Beijing morning, the day of the Opening Ceremony.
Thin grey milk is the color of the sky. Any pollution, if it's present, hides inside this mask of thin grey milk. Not like LA smog, which is not timid in the slightest about showing its face, a grumpy painter cleaning his brushes on the horizon, brown and yellow, with a little copper mixed in for contrast.
To the race course for a morning row. Pretty much all teams present and accounted for. The exception being the US men's eight. Every rower has promised his mom that he or she will win the gold - and thus far all promises are valid and intact. It's a good day to row. Maybe the best. Everyone is a gold medalist on this day.
This Beijing/Shunyi course is a dead ringer for the Sydney 2000 course. Even the banners and bunting along the side look familiar. Recycling - good for the planet. Straight headwind, supposedly lighter in the afternoon, thus the races will be run then.
Approaching the course, there was Ted Nash peddling a bicycle, on his way to coach yet another crew. Amazing. I'll have to ask him what rowing was like before sliding seats were invented. He'll outlive us all.
Ken J, the US single sculler, took a long workout. He was training in Austin, Texas a while back, at the same time that I was there. I saw him sculling soon after I arrived in Austin, and immediately I asked him, "Where'd you learn to scull?" His technique was damn near flawless: catches subtle beyond words, (even at full power). His power application was perfect. Posture was impeccable. Huge erg score. And most importantly for a single sculler: nutty as the day is long. What more could you ask for?
While Ken took his strokes, nine local women practiced handing out medals on the award's dock. They had a coach who drilled them repeatedly for about 90 minutes on the correct way to hold the tray that would hold the medals.
After the rowing practice session was over, a Spare Scullers Race was contested, full tilt 2000 meters, with Official's boats, TV boats, overhead camera on a cable sliding smoothly in time with the lead sculler. Good race, too, damn close to the last stroke, won by an Australian sculler (world champion in the quad a year ago). Afterwards the top three finishers rowed to the award's dock, climbed out of their boats and were awarded mock medals, this being the final bit of training for the race organizers before the real racing begins on Saturday. Let the Games begin.
Opening Ceremony.
In sailing, the old saying is: 'If you can't tie knots, tie lots', which means, if you can't tie a bolin, keep tying granny knots and half hitches until you run out of line. (Then when you want to untie it, you get out a sharp knife and start hacking away.)
I have a feeling the same strategy was employed for the Opening Ceremony. Perhaps it will play better on TV, as is sometimes the case. Will the TV cameras capture the epic heat in the grandstands? Epic. Not a breath of wind, humid like Philly at the peak of summer. Sweating like a sauna with a broken thermostat.
The pre-parade acts were good to a point. I was actually hoping the producers would reanimate the Terra Cotta Warriors and have them drop in by parachute, crossbows at the ready. I suspect Spielberg had that in mind - then he quit as producer of the Opening Ceremonies to devote his energy to the latest Indiana Jones movie (the penultimate definition of a Hollywood sequel - keep remaking the movie until you get it wrong.)
When you really get down to it, the problem is the parade of athletes. It goes on for eternity plus a day, made worse by the fact that the entry schedule didn't follow the usual order - Andorra to Zimbabwe - thus the crowd was left to wonder 'How many more countries can there possibly be? Answer: Lots. Countries with names I had never heard. Do these countries exist only to compete in the Olympics?
American athletes didn't help the cause by insisting on marching into the stadium single file as though they were worried about land mines buried in the inner lanes. The reason is obvious: face time on TV. The whole world is going that way - ever since 'Hi Mom" signs were forbidden. I suspect at least three kids were conceived by Olympic athletes under the grandstand while waiting to enter the stadium.
More to follow.
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