Getting By

Sunday, August 10th

After watching a preliminary round of Women’s Artistic Gymnastics (which I got into for free because a nice Chinese woman, whose husband couldn’t make it, gave me a free ticket), I wandered around the Olympic Greens trying to trade pins. Success was relative. What I did gain from those aimless wanderings was knowledge of the USA vs. China basketball game commencing later that night. So off I went, trusty chunk of cardboard in tow.

Sequence of Events

• I get to the venue’s main entrance, and find a good spot to hold up my sign (read: area through which a large volume of pedestrian traffic would be passing
• I hold up my sign
• I hold back outrageous amounts of laughter in the form of embarrassed grins as a semi-circle of people, near 50 or so, immediately forms around me
• Plural people want to take their picture with the token white guy and his goofy sign (still lacking the Chinese characters of 学生需要票)
• I try to move directly in front of the entrance; volunteers yell at me and I yell back good-naturedly until I realize they aren’t joking, and move back to where I was. About 50 feet away.
• It starts to drizzle, people are laughing at my sign
• Volunteers offer me rain jackets, I politely refuse
• It starts to drizzle harder, people still laughing at my sign
• Volunteers offer me rain jackets, I politely refuse…but keep one for my backpack
• People continue to take pictures with me, holding up peace signs and acting Asian
• First news crew comes by, interviews me, goes away
• Rain becomes a steady, but still somewhat light, downpour
• Volunteers offer me rain jackets, I politely accept one and put it on
• I discover that the rain jacket is accomplishing almost nothing
• Friendly old woman starts talking to me and, in my broken Chinese, I communicate that I have no money whatsoever
• I exchange small talk with other foreigners trying to get tickets, no one seems quite as at ease as me with my sign
• More news crews come by, interviewing me; mostly Chinese, but at least one Italian and a Russian mixed in for flavor
• Various people offer to sell me their tickets, but I politely decline
• I realize that the rumor of over $1,000 per ticket is true
• My hopes fall
• People continue to take their picture with me
• My hopes rise
• Crowd slowly disperses
• My hopes fall
• Rain increases into a steady, medium-strength downpour
• My sign begins to disintegrate, cardboard peeling away from cardboard
• I get interviewed for sportsbusinessjournal.com (interview still not up), trade pins with the guy
• Meet cute girl; shame she went to Stanford
• Try to look forlorn as rain becomes harder - and that meant in the sense that the pollution was, quite literally, actually making the rain pellet-like. Volume was unchanged.
• Game not for another hour and fifteen minutes
• I’ve got no chance of making it to my favorite dumpling place to watch the game unless I leave now
• My sign falls over, limp and dejected, like something…well…like something limp and dejected
• Go find cute Stanford girl
• Tear up sign, with love
• See someone get a free ticket
• Shrug my shoulders
• Rain becomes a torrential downpour, redefining the phrase, “Really, really, ridiculously wet-looking”
• Realize that that’s a rip-off of Zoolander
• Go to dinner with cute Stanford girl
• Enjoy the game, the dumplings, and, despite expectations, the company

Life is hard, when you’re begging for tickets.

Screening for the 2008 Olympic Opening Ceremonies is projected to take four hours. The placement of anti-aircraft batteries around the Nest is no secret, while miles of fencing (paradoxically plastered with the “One World, One Dream” slogan), and pervasive security forces make casual strolling through the Olympic Greens impossible without accreditation. Staring up at the hodgepodge combination of steel beams making up the main Olympic stadium, more net than Birds Nest, Yalcin only sighed, whispering, “This isn’t the Olympics. Das ist scheisse, this is shit…This is Alcatraz!”

A Gymnastics competitor in the 1960 Olympics in Rome, Yalcin Özer has been to every Olympics hence, excepting the 1980 Olympiad in Moscow. Fourty-eight years, twelve Olympics (and that’s assuming he meant just the summer Games), and who knows how many events attended later, he has traveled 15,000 kilometers on a motorcycle to be in Beijing for the Games. And all he can say is, “Das ist scheisse.”

This kind of reaction makes me wonder how successful the Olympics could possibly be. With security measures that stringent, there is little to encourage a Western presence. Indeed, while Yalcin and I where meandering about the outskirts of the Bird’s Nest, not a single Westerner could be seen. Everywhere we looked it was Chinese. Now, is this a bad thing? Well, honestly, yes.

This is China’s opportunity to present itself to the world, something they haven’t really been able to do in the past. And while everyone knows China is a rising superpower, with a burgeoning industry and groundbreaking economy, this is the first chance the Middle Kingdom has had to show the world that they have, to put it in terms of a debutante, arrived. If there is no western presence, or a confined one, what sort of pronouncement can China possibly make?

Let’s just cross our fingers and hope they don’t step on any feet. Or rather, they avoid the important ones.

Articles of Interest:

China’s Agony of Defeat
The Most Politicized Games Since Berlin
Calling China’s Human Rights Bluff