The young man with classic good looks guarded the Olympic flame during its protest-ridden passage round the world. His prominent position (always standing second to the right of the flame) wrestling demonstrators and standing proudly next to the torch has brought him fame across China. 

“He is so hot and he is the pride of China! What more could a girl want?” wrote one female fan.

Second Brother’s popularity has tapped into two cultural under-currents in China — anger among many that foreign protests, mainly in favour of Tibetan independence, have tarnished their Olympics; and weariness with quickly-manufactured domestic pop and TV stars.

By contrast, Second Brother’s embodiment of classic values is compared by fans to Lei Feng, an idolised soldier of the Mao Zedong era. Chinese guess Second Brother must be a policeman or soldier, but his real identity is a closely-guarded secret.

That’s a shame for those queuing up to offer him homage and gifts, plus his many would-be wives.

PHOTO: A Beijing Olympic torch relay guard known as “Second Brother on the Right” poses for a photo on an airplane from Sanya to Beijing, May 4, 2008. Picture taken May 4, 2008. REUTERS/China Daily

What had been a building crescendo of celebration and national pride turned into an outpouring of grief and support for the earthquake-hit province of Sichuan.

Wall-to-wall television coverage of the torch relay, a blissful affair once on Chinese soil, gave way to heart-rending reports from the devastated epicentre and uplifting scenes of a nation pulling together to confront disaster.

And though the declared three-day period of national mourning has ended, China will carry its grief into the Olympics.

But if there were any questions about whether Beijing would, bit by bit, shift itself back into gear for the Games, these were put to rest for me the other night on the subway.

As I walked into Fuxingmen station, on the edge of downtown, I came upon a scene of the feverish yet meticulous work that has characterised Beijing’s Olympic preparations.

Two dozen high-school boys were running round and round in tight circles through the turnstiles. They were testing the resilience of a new ticketing system. With magnetic swipe cards in hand, they ran, one after the other, through the automatic turnstiles non-stop for nearly half an hour.

The system performed perfectly - and so did the students. Apart from some laughter and joking on the sidelines, the turnstile runners took to their task with determination and earnestness. It was a striking juxtaposition with the thousands of Chinese who have gone to Sichuan to lend a hand to the earthquake relief efforts.

I asked one of the students in the subway station if he was getting paid. “Of course not! We’re volunteers,” he said. “Everybody has to do their part for the Olympics and for China.”

Picture of Olympic countdown board in Beichuan by REUTERS/Bo Bor, Beijing subway map by REUTERS/Jason Lee  

On Sunday, it was announced that the torch relay would be suspended from Monday to Wednesday to mark three days of national mourning.

The question officials at the Beijing Organising Committee for the Olympic Games (BOCOG) returned to wrestling with after observing the three-minute silence at 2.28pm today is what should happen when it restarts?

On Tuesday and Wednesday, the torch was scheduled to visit Shanghai. Can a torch relay that is supposed to visit all of China’s provinces really skip the country’s financial capital (and venue for several Olympic soccer matches)? Will Sichuan, and most particularly the city of Mianyang, really be ready to host the flame in mid-June?     

Some in China have said that it should not resume at all, despite the fund-raising for the victims that has taken place along the route since the earthquake. 

A former deputy editor of the Communist Party mouthpiece People’s Daily suggested last week in Caijing Magazine that when the worst of the destruction was cleared, the torch should be taken to the epicentre of the 7.9 magnitude quake and relayed from there to Beijing.

“Continuing the high profile torch relay must take a large quantity of resources and attention of people, which does not match 
either the need of concentrating on disaster relief, or the deep grief at losing our compatriots,” wrote Huangpu Ping.

However, the opening seven words of Sunday’s BOCOG statement announcing the three-day suspension – ”after consulting with the International Olympic Committee” – are instructive when considering how much change will be possible.     

One constantly heard complaint when the IOC met in Beijing as protests were disrupting the torch relay in Europe was that the torch belonged to the Olympic movement, not to China.

I, for one, will be expecting the route to be kept pretty much intact with the schedule shifted back by three days and the only serious change coming in Sichuan itself.

Picture by David Gray 

The difference was that when I was stumbling through the debris in Greece, it was just a few days before the Games rather than the 114 days that remain before the Opening Ceremony here in China.

Almost lost among the thousands of words written about the torch relay during the International Olympic Committee’s visit to Beijing last week were continual statements of confidence that the athletes were going to experience a top class Games this summer with facilities that few would have seen the like of before.   

If the Bird’s Nest is anything to go by, that assessment may not be far off the mark.

Forget the aesthetics of the twisted steel exterior, from the inside it simply looks like it’s going to be a superb arena for the world’s greatest athletes to strut their stuff.

I first really caught the sporting bug when, at a tender age, I first walked into the maelstrom of a stadium packed with thousands of spectators. In my case it was an English football stadium, but friends have spoken of similar formative experiences at baseball, rugby and cricket grounds.

That feeling of awe and delicious expectation remains with me and I felt a small twinge of it when I first glimpsed the inside of the Bird’s Nest. Packed with 91,000 cheering fans in August, it will be quite a place. 

It was difficult to see too clearly today, though. It was not one of Beijing’s much vaunted “blue sky” days and the smog hung thickly.

There is still much work to be done. 

Pictures by David Gray. Also check out Liu Zhen’s feature.

I spent six days in the bowels of a five-star hotel in central Beijing chasing comments from the International Olympic Committee (IOC) President Jacques Rogge and his colleagues on events in London, Paris and San Francisco.

Unfortunately, the blog went into hibernation. But the glorious spring weather here has awoken the sleeping bears, and we’re clawing away at some interesting stuff for this week. 

Picture of Jacques Rogge at the China World Hotel by Alfred Cheng Jin

It arrived.

Some 5,000 VIPs, cheering workers and media gathered on Tiananmen Square on Monday to welcome the Beijing Olympic flame and launch the 137,000-km torch relay.

Predictably, security on the square was tight. 

The 600 reporters, photographers and television crews were bused from the Olympic media centre some four hours before the flame made an appearance.

As with all Chinese security checks, there were inconsistencies. The metal cigarette lighter in my pocket was confiscated, for example,  but the cheap plastic one in my bag made it through. Many of the security officials themselves were smoking, perhaps they got a light from the flame.

“This is normal, this happens in all countries,” said the policeman who insisted I give up the lighter.  

We sat in the spring sunshine waiting for the party to arrive from the airport, and for President Hu Jintao and the other top Communist Party officials to make their way across the road from their Zhongnanhai compound.

The song “One world, One dream” was played on loop to keep our spirits up as model workers and students in colour-coordinated uniforms waved red pom-poms and fans towards the huge portrait of Chairman Mao that overlooks the square.

Bored, I thought I would try and find out just how many security staff were involved in the operation.

“This is normal, this happens in all countries,” said the policeman I asked, echoing his colleague word-for-word and seeming to think I was challenging the legitimacy of the security operation.

I said that I understood that with China’s president due to arrive shortly, some kind of security was necessary. But how many people were involved?

“You can count them yourself,” he said with a shrug.  

The uninvited were kept at a distance, physically by cordons around the square and temporally by a one-minute delay on the television signal.

Hundreds had already gathered behind the cordons by the time the media arrived and thousands were still milling around when I left the square.  

The ceremony was spectacular. The acrobats and dancers were colourfully clothed and superbly drilled. The climax, when President Hu declared the torch relay open, was an explosion of confetti, doves and balloons.

It’s just a shame so few Chinese were able to witness it live. There was plenty of room. Take a look at our slide show.

Pictures of Hu Jintao, Liu Xiang and the Olympic flame and the climax of the ceremony by Claro Cortes IV.

The moment China has been waiting for … well one of many Olympic moments. The torch relay kicked into gear on Monday, but not without a bit of drama. (The above picture is of China’s gold medallist swimmer Luo Xuejuan.)

The Chinese media lauded the event, and several pages of newspapers were devoted to lavish descriptions of the event.

 ”At that moment, my heart was beating so hard!” the Beijing News quoted Quan Maoda, the father of a torch bearer from Inner Mongolia, as saying of the lighting.

Local papers also made much of the fact that the sun came out for the ceremony in Ancient Olympia, after overcast rehearsals. “A perfect start on the road to gold,” read one headline in the China Daily.

“Each day we will pay attention to the torch, deeply knowing that day by day the Olympics are coming closer to us,” the Beijing News quoted Zhu Yuetao, an official in the port city of Qingdao, which will host the sailing events, as saying.

Here’s the relay route:

PROLOGUE
Mar 24    - Torch lit at Ancient Olympia, Greece
Mar 25-29 - Torch Relay in Greece
Mar 30    - Handover ceremony at Panathinaiko Stadium, Athens
Mar 31    - Beijing

April 1 - Almaty 

(When the flame arrives in Beijing, a separate torch will be lit and an attempt will be made to take it up Mount Everest [Mount Qomolangma] on a day in May that presents the best climatic conditions.)

INTERNATIONAL

April 2 - Almaty, 3 - Istanbul, 5 - St Petersburg (Russia), 6 - London, 7 - Paris, 9 - San Francisco, 11 - Buenos Aires, 13 - Dar es Salaam, 14 - Muscat, 16 - Islamabad, 17 - Mumbai, 19 - Bangkok, 21 - Kuala Lumpur, 22 - Jakarta, 24 - Canberra, 26 - Nagano (Japan), 27 - Seoul, 28 - Pyongyang, 29 - Ho Chi Minh City (Vietnam)

CHINA

May 2 - Hong Kong
May 3 - Macau
May 4-6 - HainanProvince: Sanya, Wuzhishan, Wanning, Haikou
May 7-10 - Guangdong Province: Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Huizhou, Shantou
May 11-13 - Fujian Province: Fuzhou, Quanzhou, Xiamen, Longyan
May 14-16 - Jiangxi Province: Ruijin, Jinggangshan, Nanchang
May 17-19 - Zhejiang Province: Wenzhou, Shaoxing, Hangzhou, Ningbo, Jiaxing
May 20-21 -  Shanghai
May 22-24 - Jiangsu Province: Suzhou, Nantong, Taizhou, Yangzhou, Nanjing
May 26-28 - Anhui Province: Hefei, Huainan, Wuhu, Jixi, Huangshan
May 29-31 - Hubei Province: Wuhan, Yichang, Jingzhou
Jun 1-3 - Hunan Province: Yueyang, Changsha, Shaoshan
Jun 4-6 - Guangxi Region: Guilin, Nanning, Baise
Jun 7-9 - Yunnan Province: Kunming, Lijiang, Xamgyi’nyilha (Shangri-la)
Jun 10-12 - Guizhou Province: Guiyang, Kaili, Zunyi
Jun 13-14 - Chongqing
Jun 15-18 - Sichuan Province: Guangan, Mianyang, Guanghan, Leshan, Zigong, Yibin, Chengdu
Jun 19-21 - Tibet Region: Shannan Diqu, Lhasa
Jun 22-24 - Qinghai Province: Golmud, Qinghai Hu, Xining
Jun 25-27 - Xinjiang Region: Urumqi, Kashi, Shihezi, Changji
Jun 28-30 - Gansu Province: Dunhuang, Jiayuguan, Jiuquan, Tianshu, Lanzhou
Jul 2-4 - Ningxia Region: Zhongwei, Wuzhong, Yinchuan
June 5-7 - Shaanxi Province: Yanan, Yangling, Xianyang, Xian
Jul 8-10  - Shanxi Province: Yuncheng, Pingyao, Taiyuan, Datong
Jul 11-13 - Inner Mongolia Region: Hohhot, Ordos, Baotou, Chifeng
Jul 14-16 - Heilongjiang Province: Qiqihar, Daqing, Harbin
Jul 17-19 - Jilin Province: Songyuan, Changchun, Jilin, Yanji
Jul 20-22 - Liaoning Province: Shenyang, Benxi, Liaoyang, Anshan, Dalian
Jul 23-26 - Shandong Province: Yantai, Weihai, Qingdao, Rizhao, Linyi, Qufu, Taian, Jinan
Jul 28-31 - Henan Province: Shangqiu, Kaifeng, Zhengzhou, Luoyang, Anyang
Aug 1-3 - Hebei Province: Shijiazhuang, Qinhuangdao, Tangshan
Aug 4-5 - Tianjin
Aug 6-8 - Beijing
Aug 8   - OPENING CEREMONY

Check out the torch relay web site for more details.

The pix from the top are of Lou Xuejuan; Greek actress Maria Nafpliotou, playing the role of the High Priestess, lights the torch held by first torchbearer Alexandros Nikolaidis, Greece’s Olympic silver medallist for taekwando; and rest of the cast at ancient Olympia. Photos by John Kolesidis and Mal Langsdon.