For those of us who live in Beijing, the air during the Olympics has been a real treat. It smells sweet and breathes in nicely. Even better, I feel like I can see forever — buildings that are more than a mile away, even the purple outline of the Fragrant Hills to the west of the city. 

There were a lot of worries about the Beijing smog expressed by athletes and foreign journalists before the Games began. But for the last week, there has been a lovely salmon tinge to the clouds — real clouds, not smog! — in the evenings.

All this is due to Beijing having booted well over a million cars off the streets, idled construction sites, and closed the worst polluting factories for hundreds of kilometers while requiring the not-quite-so-bad plants to install and actually use emissions reducing equipment.

The weather also helped. After a hot, muggy start to the Games when a heavy fog bank sat smack over the city, some rain and a breeze have cleared things out.  The numbers of days where the air quality is rated excellent have soared.

Unfortunately, most of those measures are temporary, so our eyes and lungs may only be getting a short holiday while the Olympics and Paralympics are going on. You can live with normal Beijing air, in fact I trained for a marathon in it last year, but most people agree it’s a lot more pleasant this way.

Still, there could be some long-lasting benefit, now that people see what the air could be like. Beijing’s environmental officials have promised to step up monitoring of pollutants and continue imposing new measures to clean things up.

And in the grimy provincial towns that ring the capital, better industrial controls could also mean a better quality of life.

People like to talk about the “legacy” of Olympic Games. A cleaner Beijing would be a nice take-away from this year’s.

PHOTO: Competitors jump during the men’s quarterfinals run for the BMX cycling competition at the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games August 20, 2008. REUTERS/Jacky Naegelen

The long-distance cyclists said it was dreadful, the marathon runners live in fear of it and the tennis players want extra breaks to help them withstand its effects.

But how bad is the Beijing air really? Is it miserable beyond endurance for athletes busting their lungs to deliver peak performance? Or are the smog stories a smokescreen, part of the exaggeration attendant on any Olympic Games?

I decided to conduct a completely unscientific test. How would my 44-year-old physique, finely honed by two decades hunched over a laptop writing stories, cope with running around the Olympic venues?

Not very well is the answer, though in my own and Beijing’s defence some of that was due to jetlag. Today was easier, as the temperature had dropped to an acceptable 25 degrees Celsius and a light rain cooled my progress. But yesterday was miserable, with about 8 degrees more heat, high humidity and not a breath of wind to wick away the sweat.

I did about an 8km (5 mile) route, zigzagging through security checkpoints, past the vast media centre and between the bubble-wrap Water Cube swimming pool and the Bird’s Nest stadium. Could I breathe easily? No. Was that because of pollution? Impossible to say.

I’m not an Olympic athlete and was proud enough to trudge round my route in about 40 minutes. That’s more than I would take to do the distance back home in north London, but not disgraceful for someone with my profoundly sedentary lifestyle. My throat didn’t hurt, which is often a telltale sign of air contaminants.

For north Europeans, particularly those used to London’s perennial rain, I think the big problem is the heat. I felt like I was running in a sauna. Sweat showered off me and it took a long, cold bath to cool me down. Pity the marathon runners from Britain and Scandinavia. Put your money on athletes from Asia who are used to such conditions.

And what did I have the energy to notice on my way round the venues?

That China loves pumping out schmaltzy music from public address systems lining the avenue between the stadiums. That I kept interrupting the photographs proud local tourists were taking of themselves in front of the skeletal structure of the Bird’s Nest. And that running with a large plastic-laminated accreditation card around your neck is extremely awkward. If I had tried to leave it behind I’d have been locked out of the Olympic areas.

WEATHER GRAPHIC: Latest four-day forecast and air quality reading for Beijing. Reuters News Graphics Service.

With sensitivities running high among Beijing officials who promised a Green Olympics, including clear skies, any suggestion that the air quality is actually less than clear has caused some hurt feelings among the hosts.

It’s a prickly issue, because some athletes are limiting their time in Beijing, while four American track cyclists arrived yesterday in black face masks.

In fact, weather conditions have run the gamut in the final weeks ahead of Friday’s opening ceremony — from delightful to downright awful — and that has revealed a sharp contrast in the terms many foreign journalists use and those used by Chinese officials and media, who cite a wide range of terms but generally avoid admitting there’s actually any pollution.

These include terms translated as “fog”, “haze”, “static breeze”, “adverse weather”, “sauna” conditions, “temperature inversion”, “cloudy days”, “dark days” and of course “blue sky days”.

“Just like in the shower you cannot see the person across from you, but there is no pollution,” Du Shaozhong, deputy director of Beijing’s municipal environmental protection bureau, reassured journalists at a news conference last week. Days before he said “cloudy days, foggy days do not necessarily result from pollution in the air.”

Some editors prefer to let pictures tell the story, but Du had a ready reply for that too: “Pictures cannot reflect reality,” the Xinhua news agency quoted him as saying in a report. “They are not accurate. I really urge you not to use photos to base your assessment of air quality.”

PHOTO: U.S. track cyclist Michael Friedman arrives at Beijing airport wearing a mask, August 5, 2008. REUTERS/Issei Kato

I flew into Beijing today and was pretty surprised to find clear blue skies. Smog? What smog?

Maybe it will last, maybe not, but it’s clear that the issue of drugs in sport is not going away. Italian fencer Andrea Baldini became the latest athlete to fail a doping test in the run-up to the Games, as it was revealed on Friday that the gold medal hopeful had tested positive for the diuretic furosemide in Kiev last month.

Baldini has said he is innocent but he has been suspended pending the B sample. If that confirms the result he will miss the Games.

The news is the latest doping blow to the Olympics. On Thursday we heard that seven leading Russian women athletes would miss the Games after the IAAF said they were suspected of manipulating samples.

IOC president Jacques Rogge was recently quoted as saying that 40 athletes might test positive at the Games. Sadly, that number would not longer be much of a surprise.

FILE PHOTO: Italy’s Andrea Baldini at the World Fencing Championship in St. Petersburg in September, 2007. REUTERS/Alexander Demianchuk