According to Vice Minister Cui Dalin of the State General Administration of Sport, the Chinese Olympic delegation will have around 570 members, the country’s largest ever for the world’s top sporting event.

The first time China took part in the Olympics was in 1984, when it sent only 225 members to Los Angeles. And in 2000 and 2004, China sent 311 and 407 people to the Sydney and Athens Olympics respectively.

According to the Associated Press, China’s deputy sports minister seems to have little hope that the home team can even qualify for the Olympics, let alone win anything.

Cui Dalin said, ‘We’ve got to take a pretty sober, objective view toward this. Overall, we’re not a big sporting nation.’

That was in response to Jim Scherr, head of the U.S. Olympic Committee, saying, ‘We have no illusions. This will be a very difficult competition.’

In 2004, the United States led the world with 102 medals, and China finished third with 63.

The writer comes from Wales which, in the Olympics, is not counted as a country and has therefore never won a medal. Winning a plethora, an inundation, of Olympic medals does not change the world, does not bring down the price of pork. But it does raise the spirits of a nation.
Source: CCTV.Com

It will not be late. Merely that the completion date for the Beijing Olympics marquee venue has been pushed back by a month to allow preparations for the opening and closing ceremonies. It will now be fully ready late April,

Jiang Xiaoyu, in the China Daily newspaper, said, ‘The construction of the venue and the background setting up for the ceremonies are going on together now, which has postponed the working progress of the Bird’s Nest. The Bird’s Nest will be the last but the best venue at the Beijing Games.’

Organizing committee spokesman Sun Weide said the main structure of the stadium was complete and only finishing touches remained.

With enormous twisted beams wound around the exterior like silver twigs in a nest, the 91,000 seat National Stadium is the centerpiece of the games, a massive prestige effort which will make the games memorable and will remain as a wonderful sympol. A legacy of the games.

Jiang Xiaoyu did not elaborate on the preparations for the opening and closing ceremonies — directed by Chinese filmmaker Zhang Yimou. The details are top secret.

Speculation among ordinary Chinese abounds on the Internet, with many guessing at how the Olympic flame will be lit during the August 8 opening ceremony.
Source: AP

It will start at the Panathinaiko Stadium in Athens, seen here, built around 330BC and gloriously reconstructed for the first modern Games in 1896, thanks to a wealthy Athenian benefactor. On 30 March, the 2,300-year-old stadium will witness the passing of the flaming Olympic baton from the Greeks to the Chinese.

The flame will then take a 137,000km journey through every continent except Antarctica over a period of four months.

The torch is scheduled to pass through London on 6 April, San Francisco (9 April), Buenos Aires (11 April) and Canberra (24 April), before reaching Hong Kong on 2 May at the start of a tour of China and Tibet. The highlight — literally — will be an attempt to take the flame to the summit of Mount Everest: a second torch will be left with a group of mountaineers who are planning an ascent in May.

Is Beijing ready for the games?

In contrast to Athens 2004, whose Olympic building program only just met the deadline, the Chinese capital is well ahead of schedule. In fact, some of the 15 new venues were completed more than a year ago, prompting the IOC President Jacques Rogge to urge the organising committee to slow the work down.

The main stadium is not yet quite finished. It will be and the opening ceremony will start at 08:08:08pm on 08-08-08. In Chinese numerology you cannt get much luckier than that.

The airport has a new, third terminal to cope with the Olympic traffic, and Beijing’s metro is being almost trebled in size, with seven new lines and 90 new stations.

For your information the headquarters of the Olympic movement is in a city that has never staged the Games, and is never likely to.

Baron de Coubertin founded the International Olympic Committee in Paris in 1894, but it moved to Lausanne after the First World War because of Switzerland’s neutrality. Which will almost certainly never see an Olympic Games. It matters not.

Beijing will do all the shining and glory the Olympics will ever need. Read the long, exhaustive and superbly researched story by clicking on Source.
Source: The Independent

Investors and analysts are trying to predict the games’ effects on China’s booming stock markets.

Some fear shares will drop in value once the event is over.

Others say the experience of past Olympics suggests that equities will continue to rally.

Start with the fact that the Olympics will leave behind an amazing heritage of infrastructure which will, for tourists, make visiting Beijing a delight.

Then consider China’s economy is growing at a fast pace — 11.5% a year according to the latest quarterly statistics although it is possible/probable that will come off the boil a bit.

Garry Evans, chief Asian equity strategist for HSBC in Hong Kong, says economic and stock market performances after an Olympics are driven largely by the event’s success: ‘An impressive, smoothly run Olympics tends to boost the confidence of the host nation’s citizens and the respect of the rest of the world.’ True. And an efficient smoothly run HSBC would not have to spend so much time explaining its plight to its shareholders.

Still he is right in saying that since the 1964 Tokyo games host country stock markets on average rose 21% in the year after the event.

Galaxy Securities in Beijing, however, said its analysis did not find any Olympic effect on host country shares in the five years before and after games held since 1984.

Wang Zhuo, a Galaxy analyst, says there was no apparent influence on the developing trend, ‘except Barcelona, which saw three months of drop before the Olympics. Seen as a whole, the scale of impact of the Olympics on an economy always differs with the scale of the economy. Smaller economies like South Korea or Japan were influenced more by the Olympics. China won’t see such a great impact of Olympics on its general economy but certain industries will be affected a lot.’

Wang Zhuo plainly did not include Australia in her analysis which has seen nothing but boom times since its Olympics and a fair guess will be that the boom will continue for another five to ten years.

And all of the analysts seem to have forgotten that as the Olympics end so the hype for Expo 2010 in Shanghai starts. It will not be bigger than then Olympics. But it may well have more far reaching effects.
Source: Financial Times

Beijing is confident it will be able to stage an Olympic Games in a comfortable environment, said the Games organizers in Beijing.

During a video meeting (how times change) with the International Olympic Committee, Liu Qi, president of BOCOGsaid the environment kept improving, which filled the organizers with confidence of holding a Games with good air quality.

Liu Qi said, ‘Until Nov. 22, Beijing had 226 days of good air quality (air quality level II or better) this year, nine days more than the same period last year.

‘Take August as example, we had 28 days of good air quality, including two days of level I air quality and 26 days of level II.’ He added that the level of sulfur dioxide and inhalant particulate matter in the air also dropped to a new low. The illustration is a genuine one of blue skies in Beijing.

Beijing has spent RMB120 billion between 1998 and 2006, more than 3% of its GDP, on environmental protection.

The Chinese capital has urged citizens to take public transportation instead of private cars by reducing ticket prices and building subway lines as vehicle exhaust emissions became a major source of the city’s pollution.

The city has also limited the use of small coal-burning stoves and urged natural gas as the clean energy alternative.
Source: English.eastday.com