In the end they came of course. Remember all that talk about leaders boycotting the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games over China’s ties with the government of Sudan or its crackdown on Tibetan rioters?

Well, when the lavish ceremony got underway in the Bird’s Nest stadium on Friday night, some 80 leaders and royals were watching, including French President Nicolas Sarkozy who had threatened not to turn up.

The extravaganza muffled the voices of China’s critics. Three Americans staged a protest outside the stadium about an hour before it got underway, draping themselves in a Tibetan flag, but they were quickly bundled away by security forces and forgotten. Human Rights Watch put out a statement slamming China for its commercial and diplomatic ties to Myanmar’s junta on the 20th anniversary of the 8-8-88 democracy uprising that was crushed, drawing parallels with the 8-8-2008 date chosen by Beijing for the opening of the Games, but it was barely mentioned in international media reports.

There will undoubtedly be more protests and more slamming of China by rights groups between now and the closing ceremony, but the world’s attention has switched to sport.

Some foreign leaders — many of them under pressure back home to press China on its human rights record — will bring the issue up with their hosts. U.S. President George W. Bush fired a broadside just hours before he landed in Beijing, and Sarkozy handed two lists of jailed dissidents to China’s president and premier. But no one seriously expects it to change Beijing’s policies.

Andrew Small, a China expert at the German Marshall Fund of the United States (GMF), argues in the institution’s blog that there have been few concessions from China on many of the rights issues that the West has harped on in the past year.

“The mystery is why we thought it would be otherwise,” he writes. “While the Chinese government still hears the same 1990s language coursing around western politicians’ speeches, it knows that human rights — at home or abroad — don’t make the A-list of the agenda any more in its dealings with the major powers.”

Small argues that the economic stakes are too high for the United State to risk its relationship with China and there are other issues of more importance such as keeping Beijing on side in the North Korean nuclear talks and the squeeze on Iran over its nuclear programme, and then of course there is the diplomatic balancing act over Taiwan.

“Burma, Sudan, and Tibet sometimes make the upper end of a B-list but that is not where the real political capital is being spent.”

WASHINGTON - The Olympics are supposed to be all about sports, not politics, right?

Wrong.

Although the Games began in 1896 with the hope that sporting events between nations could bring about a more peaceful world, they have not escaped politics.

Over the past 112 years, nations have boycotted the Games for political reasons, others have been denied entry by the International Olympic Committee and in 1972 Israeli athletes were murdered by Palestinian insurgents.

Click here for a photo slideshow “Politics and the Olympics”, narrated by noted American sportswriter Frank Deford published by the U.S.-based Council of Foreign Relations.

Hardly anyone questions whether Beijing will be ready to host the Olympics Games in August. China is determined to put on a good show, the thinking goes, so that is what the world will get. 

No expense has been spared cleaning up the sky, removing traffic jams, building state-of-the-art stadia and teaching every Beijing taxi driver to speak some English.

Which is why the audience at a recent Olympics conference hosted by Hong Kong University was caught off guard by Yu Bu, deputy chief of the Beijing organising committee’s broadcasting coordination division.

“I don’t think China is ready for Beijing 2008 yet,” he said. “There is still so much work to be done.”

An Olympics veteran, Yu knows what “not ready” meant, having spotted mud in the main stadium in Athens, host of the 2004 Olympics. But he was not referring to that kind of problem.

“No one will have any doubt that Beijing’s stadia will be ready, but mentally will Beijing be ready?” Yu explained. “The hardware will be no problem. I am concerned about the software.”

Chinese often say that the country has world-class “hardware” -bridges and buildings, but needs to improve “software” - services and efficiency. Yu has pointed out a few weaknesses, including Beijing’s prickliness in the face of foreign criticism, its obsession with gold medals and its lack of media freedom.

Beijing wants to use the Olympics to showcase half a century of development, but in the run-up to the games it has been assailed by critics over its policies towards Darfur and now its handling of Tibetan protests.

China accuses others of politicising the Olympics. Perhaps that is so, but it’s nothing new. Think back to the Cold War tit-for-tat boycotts of the Moscow and Los Angeles Games and the politics that have dogged hosts for decades

“Every Olympics is politicised because every Olympics is a political event,” said Yale University professor William Kelly.

Some argue that China is as much to blame for politicising its Games, bragging about the number of heads of state who have agreed to attend the opening ceremony and putting a top Communist leader, a vice-president no less, in charge of preparations.

Yu thinks China is perhaps over-sensitive because the country still suffers a little from psychological inferiority despite its meteoric economic rise in recent years. Some people take criticism less seriously.  

“The pollution in Los Angeles is very bad but if you ask Arnold about it,” he said, trying to imitate the voice of California Governor and former “Terminator” star Arnold Schwarzenegger. “He would say ‘okay, I am responsible for it and I will do that’.”

As wikipedia puts it, the Terminator “feels no pain, has no emotions and will stop at nothing to accomplish its mission”.

Pictures: A large piece of Olympic hardware, the Bird’s Nest stadium, by Claro Cortes IV, Beijing taxi in Tiananmen Square by David Gray and Arnold Schwarzenegger doing his best Terminator look by Mike Blake.