Beijing Welcomes You

Liu Xiang was down. He had come out for a preliminary daytime heat in the 110-meter hurdles, and he had limped off the track before the race began. The crowd had drained out of the Bird’s Nest with him. I was on my way to Jianwai Soho to pick up basketball tickets, and the radio in the cab was playing the press conference about it, in Chinese and English. “. . . unless the pain is intolerable . . .” the translator said. The press was asking about the pressure Liu had felt himself to be under.

I got the tickets and headed across town to Wukesong. Liu Xiang went by, an image on the side of a bus, then gazing out from a blown-up magazine cover on a newsstand. Liu Xiang was drinking Coke on every third or fourth bus stop on Chang’an Boulevard.

Liu Xiang was not going to run in Beijing. He was skipping his apotheosis. Instead, he was going to recover, rest his Achilles tendon, and train and run some other time, in however more years and meets were ahead of him. Liu Xiang, of all people, now belonged to the world after the Olympics.

There was a shopping frenzy at the souvenir stands in the arena. Inside, on the NBA-approved twenty-two-ton scoreboard, a computer-rendered Nini squashed a cigarette butt; Beibei chased down an animated camera and wrestled the flash attachment from it.

The Chinese men’s team entered to a loud cheer—suspiciously loud, for how empty the arena was, with just twenty-five minutes till tipoff. I was getting too mistrustful. Maybe it was a trick of the acoustics; the music system had a strange ambient buzz-roar behind it, not just loud but overwhelmingly full-sounding, as if it had been tuned to the natural resonant frequency of the arena for maximum thrumming power.

The upper sections were more full than the middle; a knot of people with flags and cameras leaned over the railing of the top deck. The crowd cried “Ooo!” when Yao Ming tossed up an alley-oop pass in warm-ups, and gave a deep bass cheer when Yao was introduced. The cheers for Wang Zhizhi were not as loud, but sounded somehow deeper.

To my left was a middle-aged couple with a gleam in their eyes; to my right was a pair of young couples. One of the girls wore a Chinese flag—still creased from its packaging—as a shawl, over a lime-green dress, yellow flip-flops, and eggplant-colored toenails. Team China was playing Greece, with hardly anything at stake: both teams had already qualified for the medal round. If I wanted to see Chinese basketball live, I couldn’t be choosy.

After a mutually sloppy start, the Greeks went on the attack. With China down 12–7 and the crowd booing their play, Wang checked in for Yao. Greece hit a three-pointer. Wang faked a three, drove aggressively, and got the ball slapped away from him, with China keeping possession. Wang got the ball again, faked again, drove, stopped, feinted a pass, and banked in a turnaround jump shot off the glass. Whenever China had the ball now, the action was going through the old hero Wang, for good or ill—a drive for another basket, then a point-blank miss, then a loose ball Wang grabbed and put in.

But the Greeks were running out behind the defense, over and over, for easy layups. Down 38–17, China called time-out, and the announcer welcomed the “Beijing Dream Dancers,” Soojin’s team. The dancers wore red and silver, with some sort of stockings that gave their legs a weird sheen under the lights.

Yao took over for Wang. Now the game was going through him. He tried to make a move in the paint and a Greek took him down, Yao’s seven-foot-six frame hitting the floor with a thud. The crowd booed. On Greece’s final possession of the half, Wang, back in the game, blocked a shot. It was 46–24. China had attempted fourteen three-pointers, and had made zero.

The crazy-dunk team, as promised by Soojin, performed on a trampoline as the crowd clapped in rhythm to “In Da Club.” Then the trampoline act ran off and came back in gray jumpsuits to do a Ghostbusters-themed routine, ending in a dunk over a three-high human pyramid. It was more professional than some ball-spinning routines I’d seen at NBA halftimes.

In the third quarter, China’s three-pointers began falling. A deep three-pointer by Sun cut the deficit to 58–48, and the arena began filling with noise again. Greece stretched the lead back out to fifteen, then held for the last shot, but the Chinese defense smothered the play. The Dream Dancers came out for “Proud Mary”: hair flying, bodies merging into a line, arms rolling, the skirtlike trim on their hot pants twinkling.

China would make one more run, with Yao and Wang sharing the court. Wang hit back-to-back three-pointers, sandwiched around an agile rebound. But Greece slipped away again. Yao retired to the bench to rest for the medal round, his seated form jutting above those of his teammates. Greece won, 91–77. There was duct tape hiding the manufacturer’s logo on the sink in the men’s room.

The farther around Beijing I ranged to watch Olympic events, the blurrier the periphery became. The city that hosts the Games is bidding to become Anywhere. Centuries of history and seven years of planning were reduced now to a series of arenas, like the various plates on a buffet line. On my way back to Wukesong the next day, to see the Chinese women’s basketball team, I reached Zhu Zhu, the singer and baseball game hostess, on the phone. Her album had been delayed till after the Olympics. She had been doing segments about shopping and fashion for the Today show, she said, and she would be hosting a Sean Paul concert and another event, a party on Qianmen after the closing ceremony. She was getting her makeup done for Today as we spoke.

I went through security, putting the ritual dab of sunscreen on the back of my hand to show that it was nothing more dangerous than sunscreen. “Are . . . you . . . rrrready??” the voice from the PA asked. It was the quarterfinals, China against Belarus. The top deck was full again. The Chinese women did everything the men had not done: attacked, disrupted the passing lanes, forced steals. A boy behind me kept yelling “San fen!”—Three-pointer!—and was finally rewarded with one, after a patient possession.

The entertainment during the breaks was all new: European dancers; performers on stilts with backboards strapped to their backs, who threw balls to the crowd and urged them to shoot. Halftime was for traditional culture: dancers in gold, with plumed headdresses, carrying flags with ancient Chinese characters on them. To drum-heavy music, they paraded their cultural heritage around the hardwood. Later came breakdancers and then a ethnic-dance troupe, barefoot and wearing ankle bracelets.

The Chinese basketball team led all the way. Miao Lijie, number 8, was the best player on the court for either team. In the final minutes, she dribbled down the clock, drove down the right side, and got knocked down by a big Belarusian, who fouled out on the play. That settled it. At the end, Miao and her teammates danced in a circle on the court, then turned around and bowed to the audience.

A man near me was rattling a noisemaker shaped like an abacus. I went to the souvenir stand to try to get one for little Mack. There were three members of the ethnic-minority dance team on the concourse, with their costumes garment-bagged and their makeup still in place. They said they had traveled all the way up from Yunnan Province to perform.

I had the unnerving realization that there was only a limited time to buy Fuwa. On the way out, I grabbed a cab away from upstream passengers by signaling first and more aggressively. The thing about Chinese people is, they have no taxi-hailing technique. As we headed east on Chang’an Boulevard, we passed a little silver Xiali with a couple kissing passionately in the backseat.

The magazine in the taxi’s seat-back pocket had a day-by-day guide to the Olympics—“The Festival of Olympic”—in which the day designated for seeing the Bird’s Nest was August 21—“Liu Xiang’s final contest.” “Liu Xiang’s final contest is attracted to everyone. Though the match is in the evening, you can come here early to visit the ‘Bird’s Nest’ and spend the whole day here.”

The cabbie who took me to the Peking University ping-pong arena had a second cabbie riding in the passenger seat, smoking a filter cigarette. I cranked down the window, and the extra passenger hopped out at the bus depot. The morning was sunny, hot, and vaguely brown. The on-ramps to the Second Ring were jammed again. We took the Fourth Ring, passing the Olympic Tower, its countdown clock gone dark, with nothing left to count toward.

An hour’s slate of women’s games was under way. At the far end, a player from Poland by the name of Li Qian was taking a point from a Belarusian in a flurry of big smashes. Li’s style involved getting down below the table and swinging with the paddle flat, parallel to the tabletop. The Belarusian was ahead, three games to one. “Li Qian!” the cheer went up. “Jia you!” Li added enough gas to take the game.

The other women’s matches ended, and players began arriving for the eleven-o’clock men’s matches. Li kept playing. The Belarusian had been the better player, but she was visibly tired, and Li settled into a deliberate, patient rhythm, content to prolong the points indefinitely with those low, sweeping strokes. I started trying to count the shots: thirteen on a single point, then twenty-two soon after, as the men waited for the table. Li got to game point, at 10–6—but then her composure wobbled. The Belarusian began pushing the pace again, each shot harder and harder, to a conclusive smash. Suddenly the Belarusian was ahead, 11–10, and serving for the match. One shot, two, three, four, five . . . Li was holding on . . . eleven, twelve, thirteen . . . not the placid volleying game anymore, but kill shots and desperate returns . . . twenty, twenty-one, twenty-two . . . the Belarusian hammering away, trying to end it until . . . twenty-six, twenty-SEVEN—Li finally gave way. The Belarusian sank to her knees in triumph.

The crowd was very Chinese. An Austrian named Chen Weixing faced a towering Indian in red and black, with a red bandanna. “Zhongguo dui!” the crowd cheered. “Jia you!” Go, Team China! In point of fact, there was no Zhongguo dui to be seen, at least not in uniform. Team China wouldn’t be along for a few hours, till the top seeds played. But there was Chen the Austrian, and Lin Ju of the Dominican Republic, and Ko Lai Chak of Hong Kong. Chen won, and stopped to sign an autograph on the way out. Lin, the Dominican, lost. Hong Kong beat Greece.

The next round, women again, included Li Qiangbing of Austria, Tan Wenling Monfardini of Italy, and Shen Yanfei of Spain. Li, the Austrian, won, and two white Austrian men yelled heartily and waved their eagle flag at her. More players came on: Wu Xue of the Dominican Republic, Stephanie Sang of Australia, Xian Yifang of France, Lau Suifei of Hong Kong, Gao Jun of the United States.

In the one sport where China had enjoyed a historical head start, the world was ruled by Chinese athletes. By the end of the Olympic tournament, the People’s Republic of China would have collected every ping-pong medal it possibly could: men’s and women’s individual gold, silver, and bronze, and a gold in the team competition—which had replaced the old doubles competition, sparing the rest of the world the risk of being completely shut out.

Either the weather modifiers didn’t care about beach volleyball or the weather was beyond their capabilities. China’s Tian Jia and Wang Jie were playing for the women’s gold medal against the U.S. superduo of Misty May-Treanor and Kerri Walsh, in the open air of the Chaoyang arena, but it was pouring rain all morning. The friend who had been bringing me a ticket was late. I scrawled the characters for “Wo xiang mai piao”—I want to buy tickets—on a page of my notebook and tore it out. There were deep puddles in the roadway along Chaoyang Park.

I stood with an umbrella and my sign, in the drenching rain. It was time for the match to be starting. A tan minibus rolled by into the parking lot, with Jason Kidd, taking a break from the basketball tournament, sitting by the window. There were one or two other signs in people’s hands, going limp in the rain. The ticket-resale economy had shut down—too many people wanted to see China play America for the gold, and nobody wanted to get wet scalping tickets.

The United States had already won the first game by the time my friend and I splashed through the gates. The venue staff was distributing disposable full-length ponchos. Ours were pale blue. The second game was going on, and the stands were filled with other people’s ponchos, in Easter-egg pastels: pink, blue, green, yellow. The ponchos and umbrellas served mainly to channel the pouring rain into rivulets in unexpected places. Water streamed off the poncho of the man next to me, finding a gap in mine and soaking the pants pocket where I had my cell phone.

The cheerleaders were dancing down below, out in the rain. Their hair was soaked. There was a medical time-out, and it fell to them to fill the time, clapping and dancing. Play resumed, and the rain pounded down even harder. The U.S. led 17–15, but China rallied back. Now it was 18–18. Feet hammered on the sheet metal of the stands. The U.S. team pulled ahead once more, got to match point, and spiked for the win. The players fell to their knees. Then Walsh formed a huddle with the cheerleaders and bounced up and down.

The dancers weren’t out of the rain yet. For their post-match performance, they brought out their red fans. Carpeting and podiums were laid out. Workers with twig brooms swept off the platforms. There were twenty-four dancers, in four groups of six, in red bikinis with red cowboy hats. They came together in twin bowling-pin formation for “Celebration.” Wave arms side to side; step right, left. Pass the formations through each other to switch sides. The rain kept falling on them. Turn, clap clap, turn again. Rotate the whole show one-eighth of a turn around the arena. The volume on Kool and the Gang got turned up. The formations got a bit ragged, then broke up to form a sort of J wrapping around the victory platform. Hats off, hair plastered down. “Blue Monday” played on the sound system; the announcer said that the victory ceremony was five minutes away. Another dance routine filled the time with big stomping steps, the cheerleaders pulling back into V’s facing each other. Then, finally, they gathered up their hats and jogged off, heads down, behind the mob of photographers, as inconspicuous as two dozen girls in red bikinis could hope to be.

For the last night of track-and-field, we took the subway, the new No. 10 line, around the Third Ring to the Olympic spur. At the transfer station, the passengers were steered up out of the station, around the lot, through a screening checkpoint, and back down inside, free to ride to the Olympic Green. The relief of having cleared security, the sense of permission and belonging, is the motor oil in the engine of the control state.

Most of the corporate pavilions on the Green had lines too long to wait through, but we drifted through the Kodak one. People posed for victory photos with a stadium backdrop. Outside, a concession stand was selling self-heating meals: the operator opened a white plastic box, dumped a packet of meat and sauce over a bed of rice in a tray inside, put the rice tray on top of a flat white packet, put the lid back on the whole thing, and pulled a ripcord. The box sat quietly, then abruptly puffed out of shape and began steaming. There were bones in the meat, but they had been cooked so soft we could eat them. Convenience food of tomorrow.

A man in a ClimaCool mesh sportshirt and a licensed ball cap hawked and spat into the shrubbery alongside the sunken garden. The pavement of the Green was strewn with rolled-up mats, used for traction in the downpour the day before. Everywhere people were climbing up on the rolls to pose for photos, eager for the extra foot or so of elevation above the rest of the masses. On the big screen set in on the dragon’s neck of the 7 Star Hotel, Zou Shiming was outfighting an Irish boxer.

Our seats were up at the very top of the Bird’s Nest, under the rim, looking straight ahead at the national flags. Far, far away, people ran and jumped and threw javelins. The Chinese women finished next-to-last in a heat of the 4-by-400-meter relay. A Chinese runner finished far out of the medals in the 5,000 meters. Jamaica dropped the baton in the women’s 4-by-100 relay.

Then came the men’s 4-by-100 relay, with Jamaica and Usain Bolt. Bolt had already added a 200-meter record and medal to his performance in the 100. We had seen enough relays by now to know that because of the staggered start, the thing to watch was when the handoffs happened. Jamaica was a little bit ahead on the first two legs, in the relative timing, and then the baton went to Bolt. Time became space, yards of space, opening up behind him as he swept around the curve at an inconceivable speed, delivering the baton to Asafa Powell, who a little more than a week before had been the fastest man in the world. There was no one anywhere near. Powell crossed the finish line at 37.1, three-tenths of a second ahead of the old world record.

As we made our way out of the Bird’s Nest, the Water Cube glowed ahead of us like stained glass. On the subway, a Jamaican boy, maybe nine years old, hunched over in his seat and buried his head in both hands, as if he were trying to keep happiness from splitting his skull. Then he reared up and threw some uppercuts at the air and began singing aloud, to no one in particular: “BEIII-jing HUAN-ying niiii . . .”