Beijing Olympic Games

2 people die from crash near Olympic rowing venue

BEIJING (AP)—Two people involved in a crash near the Olympic rowing venue have died, the Beijing Olympic organizing committee said Thursday.

A bus from the athletes’ village collided with a van Wednesday on the way to the Shunyi Olympic Rowing-Canoeing Park.

Committee spokesman Wang Wei said two of the four van passengers died in a hospital. BOCOG said the other two passengers, one seriously injured, were still hospitalized.

“According to the investigation, the van was at fault and violated traffic rules,” Wang said.

Two Croatian rowers, the doubles sculls team of Mario Vekic and Ante Kusurin, were on the bus but were not seriously injured. They competed later Wednesday and finished fourth in their semifinal.

Australian rowing team doctor Greg Lovell was also on the bus, along with several other Olympic-accredited people. No one on the bus was seriously injured.

Ticket scramble leaves venues half empty

By Josh Peter, Yahoo! Sports

BEIJING – Bustling at noon, the plaza outside a subway station near the Olympic stadium looked more crowded than some of the venues did on Wednesday. Would-be spectators engaged in this city’s fastest-growing sport: scoring tickets.

Zahid Mir watched the chaotic scene of buyers and sellers. He sighed. In late July, Olympic officials triumphantly announced all tickets had been sold for the events in Beijing. It was a source of pride for local officials, but now it’s the basis for a conundrum.

Galled by scalpers asking up to five times the face value of tickets, Mir said he decided to watch the opening two days of competition on TV. He was shocked by what he saw.

“The (venues) were half-empty,’’ he said Wednesday. “This is just rubbish. I spoke to God-knows-how-many people, Chinese and foreigners. ‘Sorry, no tickets.’ ’’

In a country of 1.3 billion and a city teeming with more than 7 million residents, some of the best places to spread out and enjoy elbow room have been Olympic sports venues. Empty seats have outnumbered bodies at some events, leaving people to wonder who has all the unused tickets.

“That’s the million-dollar question,’’ one ticket broker said. “You’ll have to ask the Chinese government.’’

Rather than providing data about the 7.2 million tickets that were available for these Games before the announced sellout, the officials from the Beijing Organizing Committee for the Games have provided only excuses. The heat and rain, they contend, has shrunk the crowds. But interviews with buyers and sellers at the Beitucheng subway stop and other people involved in ticket distribution shed light on the situation.

On the third day of competition, Mir said he finally gave up hope of buying tickets at face value. He paid 300 yuan (about $45) for a field hockey ticket with a face value of 50 yuan (about $8). He said he’d paid face value for tickets at the 2004 Games in Athens, but on Wednesday he seemed less upset about his own plight than something else.

“If the stadium is half empty and they know it’s half empty, why don’t they bring the schoolchildren?’’ said Mir, a retiree from England. “It’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.”

Affordable tickets have been hard to find for Olympic fans.
(Josh Peter / Y! Sports)

Later Wednesday, the licensed broker for Olympic tickets allocated for the U.S. public reported a sale every three minutes and said more than 15,000 tickets remained for purchase – less expensively than at the subway plaza. Mark Lewis of CoSport, which won the contract as the official U.S. ticket broker, said the company obtained about 100,000 tickets from BOCOG to sell to the American public. But Mir has no chance at getting any of those tickets.

To purchase a ticket from CoSport, one must present a U.S. passport at the company’s pickup site in Beijing. Each of the 204 countries and territories recognized by the International Olympic Committee contracts with a licensed broker, and access to those tickets is restricted based on one’s residency.

An undisclosed number of tickets go to corporate sponsors, Olympic officials, sports federations and VIPs, and those appear to be the seats going unused. At some basketball games, for example, the upper bowl has been packed while the lower bowl that includes premium seats has been half empty.

Some of those tickets are ending up on the secondary market. One official sponsor recently sold a half-dozen premium seats with a face value of 750 yuan a ticket for twice as much. But some U.S. brokers are scrambling to find tickets, and the Internet figures to be playing a significant role.

Stub Hub, the online ticket resale company, has fueled a thriving secondary market for tickets in the United States. But there is no equivalent to Stub Hub in China because selling tickets for more than face value is illegal. Scalpers at the subway plaza said police arrested two people in the past few days, but new developments may signal an ease in restrictions.

After rounding up thousands of volunteers to help stage the Games, the government has rounded up new volunteers: people to stand and cheer at the sparsely attended events. They’ve been easy to spot, clad in yellow shirts. The scene at the subway plaza indicated a change, too.

A uniformed police officer stood on the curb no more than 15 feet away as sellers fanned out tickets and buyers pulled wads of cash out of their pockets. Asked if scalping was illegal, the officer confirmed it was and said those violating the law would be arrested. But no one looked in jeopardy of being detained, much less arrested.

Among the sellers was a small woman who looked to be in her 50s and out of her element. She tugged on the arm of a young woman and offered to sell tickets. When the potential buyer expressed interest, the woman led her around the back of the subway station, out of view of the police, and pulled three tickets out of her handbag. Two were for the U.S. women’s basketball game with a face value of 100 yuan. One was for the U.S. men’s game with face value of 50 yuan.

The older woman said she had waited in line for 24 hours with an estimated 30,000 people when Beijing officials sold what they reported were their last tickets. She said she was an unemployed suit maker and that her son had wanted to attend the games, but family issues would prevent them from going.

Now she was trying to sell the pair of tickets to the U.S. women’s game for 2,000 yuan and the ticket to the U.S. men’s game for 1,500 yuan.

Where were all the tickets as NBC’s cameras showed rows and rows of empty seats? After the potential buyer moved along, three of them went back into the Chinese woman’s purse.

‘Goodwill ambassadors’ swarm Olympics to give help

By DIKKY SINN, Associated Press Writer

BEIJING (AP)—The Chinese capital is swarming with an army of 70,000 young volunteers, hundreds of them from overseas, who are helping foreign tourists and media visiting for the Olympics.

The volunteers, acting as goodwill ambassadors, are visible everywhere dressed in bright blue and white polo shirts—outside sports venues, on sidewalks and at bus stops and subway stations.

Their task is to shepherd the estimated 500,000 foreigners expected for the Olympics and provide help to thousands in the media.

Most of the volunteers, who are working for the Beijing Olympic Organizing Committee, have been drawn from all corners of China. But at least 300 of them have paid their way from overseas for what they see as a once-in-lifetime opportunity.

Sarah Scott, a 21-year-old University of North Carolina student, got her first glimpse of China by volunteering to help at the games.

“To me, it’s an awesome adventure and I’m going to learn so much and meet new people and see sports at the highest level,” said Scott, who shelled out $1,800 to travel to Beijing. “I just couldn’t imagine anything better.”

Scott is among the 300 international volunteers BOCOG recruited from universities in the U.S., the United Kingdom and Australia to assist media at Olympic venues.

Unlike other hosting countries, who usually rely on their own people, China chose to rely on foreign students to ensure high-quality services.

Scott said the six Chinese students she works with at the help desk in the Main Press Center speak varying degrees of English, but with her mother tongue and proficiency in Spanish, and another French-speaking volunteer, her team is able to quickly field questions thrown at them.

Scott is a college senior studying journalism. She arrived about a month before the games for onsite training. Organizers also gave international volunteers a crash course in Chinese culture.

“They took us on a long weekend trip to the Great Wall, Summer Palace and brought us to eat Peking duck. … It was a weekend straight of just going to all places,” she recalled.

Scott also made her own preparations. She met with other volunteers from her university every week, starting in January, to learn about Chinese history, culture and politics, as well as some simple Mandarin.

The volunteers are given free lodgings and meals in Beijing’s universities, but otherwise being an Olympic “ambassador” is at their own expense.

Some of the Chinese volunteers have battled hard to get their blue and white shirt. After Beijing won the Olympic hosting rights seven years ago, Sophia Yang, then a high school student in Hunan province, was determined to get into a university in the capital, paving the way for what she believes is a unique experience.

She has spent years absorbing as much Olympic-related information as possible, learning the rules and regulations of different sports and brushing up on her English. She is 24 now and has postponed her two-year graduate program by a year.

“I planned to be part of the Olympics many years ago,” she said in English. “During my whole life, maybe I can’t encounter such a chance again.”

Updated: 2008-08-11 02:43:48

Model volunteer Yuan Yangyi helps a passerby in Xidan.

(BEIJING, August 10) — Volunteers have been a regular fixture at the Olympics for quite some time. This year’s 1,700,000 Olympic volunteers include 100,000 venue volunteers, 400,000 city volunteers, 1,000,000 society volunteers, and 200,000 cheerleading volunteers.

Continue reading ‘1,700,000 volunteers welcome Olympic guests’ »

Some Web sites remain blocked at Beijing Olympics

By STEPHEN WADE, AP Sports Writer

BEIJING (AP)—Some Web sites remained inaccessible to reporters as competition got under way Saturday at the Beijing Olympics.

China’s communist government routinely filters its citizens’ access to the Internet, but in the runup to the Olympics Chinese officials and officials with the International Olympic Committee vowed there would be no censorship of the Internet for accredited journalists covering the games.

Some sites were unblocked 10 days ago after reporters arriving to cover the games found them blocked and complained to the IOC, but others remain inaccessible, including sites related to the Tiananmen Square protests, Tibet, Taiwan and the Dalai Lama.

While searches for these keywords turned up long lists of Web sites, attempts to open some of them resulted in a message saying the page could not be displayed.

A search for information about the outlawed Falun Gong spiritual movement not only drew that error message but froze the search engine and prohibited further searches for several minutes. Sites that host thousands of blogs appeared to be open, but specific blogs remained blocked.

A statement by Chinese officials indicated they had gone as far as they intend to go.

“Yes, we promised to provide free access to the Internet—except for a few that would jeopardize our national security and would not be good for the healthy growth of our young people,” said Wang Wei, executive vice president of BOCOG, the Olympic organizing committee.

“As in any other country, there are some kinds of limitations,” Wang added. “However, I think we are going to provide sufficient access for the media to cover the games.”

IOC spokeswoman Giselle Davies suggested reporters should keep pushing the Chinese.

“Sites that you need to have for your job, it’s important that you raise them for BOCOG’s awareness,” Davies said. “It’s ongoing work.”

Rebecca MacKinnon, who studies Internet censorship in mainland China, said none of the changes have affected Chinese-language sites.

“The censorship situation for those Web sites has not loosened at all,” said MacKinnon, who teaches journalism at the University of Hong Kong. “From what I understand they have even tightened.”

Some US cyclists, triathletes still wearing masks

By TIM REYNOLDS, AP Sports Writer

BEIJING (AP)—Jennie Reed walked down the ramp leading from the cycling track to the bottom floor of the Laoshan Velodrome on Friday, the infamous black mask that created such a stir earlier this week in image-conscious Beijing again wrapped around her nose and mouth.

She got outside, took the mask off, and boarded a bus. No one even seemed to notice.

At least two of the four American cyclists who arrived at Beijing’s airport Wednesday wearing the masks—and then issued an apology to Beijing Olympic organizers for doing so—are still wearing them at certain times, citing precautionary reasons. U.S. triathletes also wore masks after arriving in the city on Thursday.

As China prepared for an opening ceremony designed to showcase the country to the world, the hazy air continues to be a touchy issue. Officials have made numerous attempts to improve air quality before the games, including recently imposed measures to pull half of Beijing’s 3.3 million vehicles off the roads, halt construction and close some factories.

But some U.S. athletes still weren’t taking any chances.

“The intent” of wearing the mask, U.S. cyclist Bobby Lea said, “is just to stay healthy.”

“I wish it wasn’t taken as an offense to the Chinese,” Lea said in an interview with The Associated Press. “It’s a shame, because BOCOG (the Beijing Olympic organizing committee) has done such a fantastic job. The city, it’s almost an entirely different city from what we saw in December. So it is a shame.”

Lea, the only cyclist involved in the mask-wearing brouhaha who would speak at the velodrome Friday, said his reason for wearing the device stems from an illness he said he contracted quickly upon arriving in Beijing for a World Cup race in December. Within 30 minutes of getting off the plane for the World Cup, Lea said, his throat was sore and the condition only got worse from there, meaning he could barely train before the competition. He didn’t want to deal with the same issues again at the Olympics, so he’s taking many precautions, including wearing a nasal device on flights.

“Every single day I’ve thought about these games, I thought about my last experience here and being sick and just missing out on that one ride and potentially missing out on my whole Olympic opportunity,” Lea said. “So naturally it’s a worry, coming back to the same place.”

Lea did not wear the covering at the velodrome Friday, nor did individual pursuit gold-medal hopeful Sarah Hammer. The fourth American to emerge from Wednesday’s flight into Beijing wearing the mask, Michael Friedman, was not at the velodrome but has indicated on his personal blog that he will continue wearing a mask at times.

“Airplanes and airports are just breeding grounds for germs,” Lea said. “As an athlete in peak physical form, our immune systems are actually lower than normal. Had I been flying anywhere in the U.S., I would have been wearing a mask.”

In a statement, USA Cycling reiterated that athletes can choose to use the masks if they feel it necessary.

“Whatever an athlete feels they need to do to properly prepare for their competition, as long as it’s within the rules, those choices are at the discretion of the athletes,” spokesman Andy Lee said.

American women’s road cyclist Kristin Armstrong, said wearing the masks is a personal choice but she questioned whether wearing the masks coming off the plane was the best move.

“Unfortunately, it’s not just this person or that person, it’s cyclists, and I don’t want any negativity coming down on this sport as a whole. We have enough problems on our own,” said Armstrong, who is not wearing a mask as she prepares for her two outdoor events, a road race Sunday and a time trial Wednesday.

Two U.S. triathletes, Matt Reed and Hunter Kemper, also wore masks for a jog around the Olympic village. Matt Reed said the heat made it difficult to breathe comfortably during his run around the Olympic Village and he won’t wear it again while working out.

But that might be the only time he goes maskless in Beijing.

Whether going out in Beijing or walking around the village, he’s going to wear the mask to cover his nose and mouth.

“I definitely am conscious (of perceptions) and I don’t want to offend anyone,” Matt Reed said, “but I’m out for my own health, really. I’m sure they know the air quality is not good, so I don’t see it’s that bad wearing a mask.”

Triathlete Jarrod Shoemaker, who wore a mask before qualifying for the U.S. team during the Beijing World Cup in September, noted the skies had changed from “more yellow and dark” last year to a whitish color. Shoemaker said the sky “doesn’t look as bad, but you can still kind of taste it.”

“We take the precautions we need to,” triathlon team leader Scott Schnitzspahn said. “We’re still far enough out from our competition that a little exposure isn’t going to really affect them too much. But we still don’t want them running around sucking on a tailpipe.”

AP Sports Writer Aaron Beard contributed to this report.

Australia complains about Olympic issues

By DENNIS PASSA, AP Sports Writer

BEIJING (AP)—Australia’s Olympic chief criticized Beijing organizers on Friday over their “wishy-washy” assurances on Internet access, and said bus transportation and pollution were still problem issues.

Olympic organizers BOCOG lifted restrictions on some Internet sites earlier this week after complaints from media and the IOC.

“We all would have preferred if some of the other assurances, wishy-washy as they may have been in terms of opening up Internet sites, had happened,” Australian Olympic Committee president John Coates told a news conference hours before the opening ceremony for the 2008 Beijing Games.

“Some have been opened up, there is progress, and where I sit, things happen slowly in this country. It’s probably better progress than we from the West might think,” added Coates, who was a senior official in the organizing committee for the Sydney 2000 Olympics.

Wang Wei, executive vice president of the Beijing organizing committee, said Internet access was available.

“I think you are free to cover the games,” Wang said. “The Internet access is good except for just a few (sites) for security reasons. … The pornography is blocked like in any other country.”

A search Friday showed several sites were still blocked. Although links to Amnesty International and a general search of the Dalai Lama were available, any site for the banned spiritual movement Falun Gong was blocked, as was the site for Students for a Free Tibet.

Coates acknowledged that “China has done everything in terms of the venues they are offering us … they have provided a very warm welcome for us.” But he said said bus transportation to the rowing venue in particular was a problem.

“We are not happy with the quality of the buses that have been provided for the drive to Shunyi,” he said.

The venue is listed on the Olympic Web site as being 36 kilometers (22 miles) from the city and a 30-minute bus drive, but Coates said the trip was taking more than 50 minutes.

“It’s pretty tough on these big blokes, there’s not much padding, it’s not air conditioned,” Coates said. “In some cases we are providing our cars to get the athletes out there. The international body FISA has been trying to rectify that for over a week without much success.”

When asked if Beijing organizers had done enough on the pollution problem, Coates said: “No, but I don’t know what more they can do.”

The host city’s polluted air has been one of the biggest worries for Olympic organizers and prompted drastic measures earlier this month that included pulling half the city’s 3.3 million vehicles off the roads, halting most construction and closing some factories in the capital and surrounding provinces.

Coates said Australia hasn’t yet been affected by the smog and pollution. Medical checks on its more than 230 athletes now in the athletes’ village show no respiratory problems, he said.

He said that US$20 billion of the US$70 billion cost of the Beijing Games has gone towards environmental measures—“greening various parts and doing what they can.”

“I don’t know how you reverse some of these things,” Coates said. “Let’s hope that’s one of the legacies of these games—that the realization of the damage that’s been done and will continue to be done unless they are more careful.”

AP Sports Writer Stephen Wade contributed to the report.