Beijing Olympics 2008: Torch relay reaches Muslim west China

Chinese officials told Olympic torch relay spectators in the restive region of Xinjiang to stay home and watch the event on television today amid a growing security clampdown ahead of this summer’s games.

As crowds were kept off the streets in the far west of China, elsewhere police deported members of non-governmental organisations, stepped up inspections of foreign-owned premises and tightened controls on religious groups.

The pre-Olympics squeeze has resulted in a drastic restriction on visas, emptying Beijing’s hotels and prompting criticism that this year’s games – originally touted as China’s coming-out party – have become a shutting-down demonstration by the communist authorities.

Their immediate focus of concern is the Olympic torch, which was plagued by pro-Tibet and anti-government demonstrations in London, Paris and San Francisco during the overseas legs of the relay. In areas of China where the Han ethnic majority are dominant, the flame has been welcomed by enthusiastic crowds.

Today, spectators were carefully vetted as the torch passed through Xinjiang, a largely Uighur Muslim region where the government is embroiled in a low-intensity conflict with what it describes as a terrorist independence movement. The regional capital of Urumqi was locked down by police, according to the Agence France Press and Reuters news agencies.

Wary of the throngs that greeted the flame elsewhere, the authorities banned spectators from gathering on bridges or climbing trees, according to the state media. The main square was sealed and TV images showed torch-bearers running through streets where soldiers and police were more visible than the public.

Invited workers and students – most of whom appeared to be Han – were allowed to cheer, but local officials discouraged larger gatherings on security grounds.

“Considering that too many people will cause a lack of safety, we are recommending that everyone watches on the television from home,” Li Guangming, the Communist party’s sports chief for the region, told the official Xinjiang Daily.

Xinjiang is home to 8 million Uighurs, some of who are unhappy at the growing control of Han Chinese on their economy and culture.

The government wants to emphasise the development of the region, but, in a sign of security unease, the state media claims police have foiled two Uighur terrorist plots this year to sabotage the Olympics.

Many foreigners in Beijing are also experiencing a tightening of controls. Businessmen, aid workers, artists and students are being denied visas.

Philip Tavernier, the Doctors Without Borders China director, was last week turned away from Beijing airport, along with another colleague.

“He had a valid three-month visa issued in Beijing,” said the group’s Asia coordinator, Luc van Leemput. “We have never had this difficulty before. We are trying to find out why from the Chinese authorities and the Belgian embassy.”

There is little doubt the Olympics is a factor. Apparently fearful that foreign students might join anti-government demonstrations, there has been a crackdown on visa renewals.

“I would have liked to stay over the summer and may have volunteered for the Olympics, but I cannot get a visa so I have given up,” said one British woman who has studied Chinese at Beijing Normal University for the past year. “I guess that is because they think we are going to protest.”

Concerts and business conferences have been cancelled. The hotel industry is suffering its worst downturn in five years, with occupancy rates down about 10% on last year. “One of the root causes is definitely the visa issue,” said an insider. “All the indications are that the government is tightening security ahead of the Olympics.”

Dozens of bars and restaurants near the Workers’ Stadium in the entertainment area of Sanlitun have been ordered to close for two months from mid July.

“We are inside the security cordon,” said Damjan DeNoble of the Kro’s Nest bar. “But we are taking it in our stride… Everyone is required to make sacrifices for security.”

Outside the cordon, foreign-owned firms say police inspections have been stepped up, along with checks of visas, travel documents and residency permits.

In the past month, the two biggest foreign-linked entertainment guides have come under scrutiny. Beijing Time Out is fighting for its existence after having two issues pulled for licensing violations. That’s Beijing has been taken over by Chinese owners close to the state.

Art exhibitors say it has become increasingly difficult to arrange visits by foreign critics and buyers. “In this paranoid attempt to stifle a few potential protesters or whatever it is the authorities are afraid of, they have effectively destroyed their core support network of foreigners in Beijing who represent the city in a positive light to the outside world,” said one media insider.

“Many foreigners who work in the arts, media and culture have given up on Beijing after many years because they feel they are being dealt a very unfair blow – just for being foreign.”

China is taking no risks. In the past week, the state media announced the appointment of a new security tsar – Yang Huanning, who has experience in Tibet and Xinjiang – and new anti-terrorism measures at Beijing airport, including double-fencing, steel-shutters on manholes and covert police booths.

The government switched the schedule of the Tibet leg of the torch relay, which has become a focus of particular concern and controversy since the deadly unrest in Lhasa in March. The new dates remain a secret, but the torch is expected in the mountain region soon after it passes through Xinjiang.

Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/jun/17/china.olympicgames2008?gusrc=rss&feed=networkfront

An Olympic nightmare in Beijing

China’s high-profile stadium is stunning, but the other buildings in its new park in Beijing don’t deserve any medals

Last month I was the first Western journalist to be given a full tour of Beijing’s Olympic Park. Expectations were high. When the world’s gaze falls on Beijing on August 8, the Chinese want their Olympic buildings to dazzle. And as long as the world’s gaze remains mainly on the Herzog & de Meuron-designed national stadium, they’ll succeed. It is amazing. There’s nothing like it in the world. As an image, it is exactly what Beijing’s Olympic committee wants beamed around the world as the image of new China, as instantly get-able as their cheesy slogan: “One World, One Dream”.

For a nation that deeply values formal architectural symbolism, creating an iconic shape that simultaneously evokes Heaven (a circle) and the auspicious bird’s nest was genius on the part of the architects. But so mesmerising has it become that nobody mentions the small matter of the 2,800-acre Olympic park and 31 other venues surrounding it. This is probably a good thing. Because the “bird’s nest” might be the ultimate in architectural eye candy, but its neighbours are not. Architecturally at least, the Beijing Olympics are a flop.

Two months before the Games begin, the Olympic park’s 4m (12ft) high steel perimeter fence is ringed with stony-faced soldiers, protecting it from sightseers – hundreds, maybe thousands of them, here to get that killer good-luck photo of Them with It. Cars crawl, while snappers scramble up mounds of unlaid paving stones, and stretch mobile phones over the fence for a shot to show the folks back home. For those without cameras, Casio-carrying entrepreneurs offer “instant memories”, alongside touts who open their jackets to reveal, hanging inside, knock-off miniatures of the bird’s nest – “in gold, in gold”.

Getting closer than this is well-nigh impossible. Until August this is Beijing’s new Forbidden City. So I am lucky indeed to be the other side of the soldiers.

The stadium looks impossible, unreal. From afar it appears neatly woven, but up close, the exterior steel lattice, what Pierre de Meuron calls the “architectural forest” looks impossibly complex. Inside the nest sits the red-painted concrete “egg” holding 91,000 seats – almost circular. But the real drama explodes in the space between this and the exterior nest, where jagged walkways and staircases weave between the frenzied branches, a true architectural forest, and views are thrown deep between the trees or out into Beijing. Unfortunately, this most stupendous of buildings throws the barren monumental park over which it reigns into even more stark relief.

The Chinese, we always hear, can accomplish miracles. Here they truly do achieve the impossible: a place at once awe-inspiring and banal. Imagine a trading estate outside Daventry inflated into Mao-style monumentalism. Few of the venues – most brand new – rise above the mundane. Of the more high-profile, the bird’s nests’s neighbour, the National Aquatics Centre or “water cube”, is a one-trick pony, though it is quite a trick. The Australian architects PTW, along with Arup engineers, the China State Construction Engineering Corporation and the Shenzhen Design Institute, have tried to out-icon its neighbour with a box of bubbles. The building’s material – ETFE, a sort of architectural bubblewrap, reinforced with a steel cage, 99 per cent lighter than glass, and far more efficient at transmitting light and insulating – creates a form designed to cut energy costs by 30 per cent. They like to show this one lit up blue at night like psychedelic bubblebath, perhaps because up close in daylight it looks cheap and – inevitably – plasticky. The interior is about as thrilling as your council swimming baths.

Next door is Digital Beijing, an ominous-sounding “data and control centre” by the Chinese architect Pei Zhu. It is shaped, cheesily, like a mainframe computer from the 1960s, cut with linear glass strips evoking a circuit board. Four gloomy stone slabs, divided by glass atria, do an excellent Orwellian Ministry of Truth impression. It’s slightly less spirit-crushing inside.

Finishing the main quartet is the national indoor stadium, by the German architects Gloeckner, of which there is nothing of interest to say except that it has a curvy roof. As one of the centrepieces of the world’s biggest event, therefore, it’s something of a letdown.

But it’s the park itself that really disappoints, relentless in its overbearing scale, dreariness and inhumanity. It was planned by the Boston firm Sasaki Associates, and set with maximum symbolism on the strict north-south axis that gives Beijing its structure, skewering the Forbidden City, Tiananmen Square, Mao’s Mausoleum and the hill in Jingshan Park where the last Ming emperor hanged himself.

It is full of fascistic plazas, crummy detailing, feeble set-pieces with nothing but conifers and spindly trees for shade in the August heat, and is so vast that it would take the Yellow River rerouted to keep it green come August. All this is suspended within an Alphaville edge-of-city site with scant relationship with the rest of Beijing.

Plans for the site’s legacy are opaque, and this could well become the white elephant to end all white elephants. I wasn’t expecting subtle urban planning from the country that throws up ten-lane motorways every other day. But, given the hoopla, I wasn’t expecting this. We – myself included – have mocked London’s “flatpack Olympics” plans for 2012, while holding up China’s “anything-you-can-do-we-can-do-bigger” monumentalism as a model. Time to eat our hats.

Parade of the uglies: other Chinese Olympic venuesLaoshan Velodrome (above)

Are we still on ration books? This venue, by the German velodrome experts Schürmann, leaps straight out of Dan Dare, the spitting image of Ralph Tubb’s Dome of Discovery for the Festival of Britain, only what was innovative, striking and futuristic back before Sputnik, looks hackneyed and dated now that the future has arrived without jetpacks and Ming the Merciless.

Basketball Gymnasium

OK, it’s not bad. Does the same trick as the “water cube”, only the Beijing Architecture Research Institute’s version is slightly better executed. The interior is more refined, and better integrated with the box’s show-off façade, an abstract box of gold-coloured steel slats which from afar look like bamboo, but, perforated, seep in light during the day and glow alluringly at night.

Shooting Range Hall

Another dead ringer for a provincial multiplex, by Zhuang Weimin, with one show-off party trick, a massive shell-shaped cantilever. Weimin has described the design as “simple and natural”. We call it boring as hell.

Tennis Centre

This, by China Construction Design International, is meant to resemble a cute, 12-petalled flower unfurling in the sun. Instead it looks like the jaws of a giant alien robot bursting from the earth ready to gobble the universe.

Source: http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/visual_arts/architecture_and_design/article4158506.ece

American college kids in Beijing launch Olympics song

By Patrick Whiteley, Vivian Wang

A musical band of American college kids living in Beijing have launched a song to celebrate Beijing Olympic Games countdown.

Trevor Nichols and Todd Balazovic are members of Horse, Horse, Tiger, Tiger a Beijing-based pop band, and want to let all the 1.3 billion Chinese know how much young foreigners love China.

The song Wo Jiu Shi Ai Bu Guo (I Just Can’t Get Enough Love) is set to appear on Chinese television, Beijing radio. It will soon be launched on the web and the boys hope it will let everybody in China know that they just can’t enough of the people love.

Lead singer Nichols says Beijing is undergoing an amazing transformation and the song reflects the city’s vibrant mood and how much he loves the Olympic city.

“There is so much love in the hearts of Beijingers, both old and young, and my time in the capital has been one of the best times of my life,” he said.

“As our song says, we just can’t get enough of Beijing’s love.”

After the Olympics, the 20-year-old starts his freshman year at Duke University, one of America’s best colleges, and has been working as an intern at China Daily, the only national English language newspaper.

Nichols, whose family lives in Hong Kong, said has caught Olympic Games fever and was excited that Beijing was hosting the world’s biggest sporting event.

Nichols first started learning putonghua when he was at primary school living in Hong Kong and enjoys coming to capital practice his language skills.

The young man said his Chinese friends were surprised to hear an American singing their city’s praises in the local language.

“We had so much fun in Beijing this summer, the local people are fantastic and really friendly,” he said.

“I’m learning Chinese and I love to sing, so releasing this song was a perfect match.”

Balazovic, 23, who returns to Central Michigan University (CMU) later this year, is one many American students working or studying in Beijing.

He also works at China Daily and said experiencing China first hand was a lot differerent to what he learnt in American media.

“I think Americans, and people from all over the world will see a very different China during the Olympic Games, from what they have read in the newspapers or on TV,” he said. “I love this city, and just can’t get enough.”

Ma Ma Hu Hu producer Patrick Whiteley said the song was not an original composition but was a cover version of 1980s pop classic Just Can’t Get Enough by Depeche Mode.

Whiteley, who works as a senior editor at China Daily and lived in Beijing two years, said the band chose the song because many foreigners around the world will recognize the tune and understand the words even though they are in Chinese.

The Australian journalist said laughingly that the band’s name reflects the average ability of everybody in the band. “We are not talented people, we are Ma Ma Hu Hu,” he said.

“But you don’t have to be Lu Xia to be a winner at Beijing Olympics. You can be Ma Ma Hu Hu like us and share the winning spirit of the Games,” he said.

“Beijing is filled with so many great people, and in our eyes we think they are champions.

“The city and its people deserve gold medals and this song is our gift.”

Source : http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/olympics/2008-06/17/content_6769790.htm

Euro 2008: Germany reach goal thanks to brilliant Michael Ballack

Austria (0) 0 Germany (0) 1

Luiz Felipe Scolari would have first appreciated Michael Ballack during the 2002 World Cup. Then, Ballack, fighting the disappointment of having the European Cup snatched away from him by the brilliance of Zinedine Zidane, still managed to drag a much worse German side than this to a final against Scolari’s Brazil, which he missed through suspension.

This time, with another European Cup lost, he is still driving Germany forward. They would have made the quarter-finals without his thunderous, 30-yard free-kick, but it soothed the nerves that had been eating away at his players since their defeat by Croatia.

When the Germans arrived at their tournament headquarters by the northern shores of Lake Maggiore, the talk was of how relaxed and ‘cool’ they were. For the opening 49 minutes the best adjective to describe this team was ‘flustered’. After the clear-the-air talks and the “raised voices” that followed their defeat in Klagenfurt, it needed someone to take a grip and Ballack’s free kick was an example of the art of captaincy.

His reward is German qualification from the group stages for the first time since they won the competition in 1996 and a quarter-final with Portugal – a meeting with Scolari that Ballack might think has come six years too late. Vienna’s symbol for this tournament is the Ferris wheel in the Prater Park that was the enduring image of the film, The Third Man. For Ballack the wheel has kept turning.

Scolari will have a chance to see one of the blue-chip players he will inherit at Chelsea at the very closest of quarters. Where his counterpart, Joachim Low, will be in Basle, is open to question.

Both the Germany manager and his Austrian opposite, Josef Hickersberger, were sent off for reasons that where not entirely clear, though it may have had something to do with their comments to the fourth official. Both men shook hands and went to the directors’ box, where Low was greeted by the German chancellor, Angela Merkel. Depending on what is contained in referee Manuel Gonzalez’s match report, Uefa may decide to carry over Low’s suspension into the quarter-final.
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Austria’s assistant manager, Andreas Herzog, said: “The referees should do their job and not try to put on a show. Things were becoming too hectic and chaotic out on the pitch and both men tried to explain that to the fourth official. For that, they were sent off.”

As seen through Ballack’s eyes, the wheel had turned for Austria, too. The build-up resembled the preamble to the England-Scotland encounter at Hampden Park nine years ago that decided who would go to Euro 2000. There were the same wild appeals to national pride; the same quiet desperation that years of domination could be overturned in the face of some overwhelming statistics – Austria’s previous four games against Germany had seen them concede 17 times.

However, nobody had suggested that England would be “sh***ing their pants” at the thought of coming to Glasgow, as Hickersberger’s Bremen-based striker, Martin Harnik had done. On the day of the game, Osterreich, one of Vienna’s tabloids, had published a front page picture of a naked Ballack with the headline “Pull his pants off”.

“Listening to them, you would have thought we didn’t know how to kick a ball, while they were world champions three times over,” Ballack remarked. “They bit off rather more than they could chew.”

Austria’s warm-up matches had been so poor there was a petition urging them to withdraw from Euro 2008 before they embarrassed themselves. There was also a spoof documentary “showing” Austria winning the European Championship, overcoming Germany in the semi-finals.

There were appeals to genuine history; the ‘Miracle of Cordoba’ – Austria’s 3-2 victory that helped deny the Germans a place in the 1978 World Cup final. There was a miracle in Vienna last night but it was only that the German striker, Mario Gomez, managed to miss an open goal from three yards out. The rest was routine.

Source: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/

Spar European Cup 2008. The heat is on…

But hopefully it won’t be quite as hot in Annecy as it was last time…

THE last time the Spar European Cup was held in Annecy, the temperatures nudged 100 degrees. It was a truly scorching weekend and I remember feeling genuine sympathy for the 5000m runners especially.

Standing in the shade was painful enough, but the British athletes showed grit and determination to ‘win’ the men’s match and place fifth in the women’s. I put the word ‘win’ in inverted commas, incidentally, because they have since had the title taken away following Dwain Chambers’ drug-taking admissions.

With or without Chambers, the fact is that Britain’s men’s team is usually always in the mix – and it looks like being the case this weekend given the strong nature of the team.

Phillips Idowu, Chris Tomlinson and Andy Baddeley, plus in-form youngsters such as Tyrone Edgar, Martyn Rooney and Tom Lancashire, should be good enough to challenge for the Cup in a contest that sees the top eight teams in the continent battle it out.

The British women’s team is also strong, with the likes of Christine Ohuruogu and Nicola Sanders, and it should avoid relegation.

The introduction of athlete contracts should also ensure there aren’t half as many last-minute withdrawals as there have been in recent years.

Britain’s probable success in the French Alpine town is a stark contrast to the current Euro 2008 football tournament, where none of the British teams could even reach the final 16 who are slugging it out in Austria and Switzerland this month.

Source: http://www.athletics-weekly.com/newsarticle.php?id=577

Euro 2008 hurting audience numbers, says Vienna State Opera

VIENNA (AFP) — Forget the Three Tenors and the World Cup. Football and opera really don’t match, the Vienna State Opera said Tuesday.

While Euro 2008 co-hosts Austria were battling it out Monday evening with arch-rivals Germany in Ernst Happel stadium on the other side of town, audience numbers at the world-famous opera house fell to their lowest level this season, the Wiener Staatsoper said in a statement.

Not because opera lovers preferred to stay at home to watch the match. They were genuinely scared to come into town where they would risk running into the hordes of football fans crowding the city centre, the statement said.

At Monday’s performance of Verdi’s “La forza del destino” (The Force of Destiny), only 71 percent of seats were filled, a near-disastrous showing for a house that regularly sells up to 99 percent of its seats on most evenings.

Indeed, the opera house said it had even decided to cancel a ballet performance (La Bayadere) scheduled for June 29, the day of the Euro 2008 final in Vienna.

Furthermore, ticket sales were dragging for performances on the days that quarter-finals were being played in the Austrian capital, namely June 20 (Verdi’s “La forza del destino”) and June 22 (Tchaikovsky’s “Pique Dame”), with tickets still available in all categories, from 10-178 euros (15-275 dollars), the State Opera said.

In the run-up to the Euro 2008 soccer championships being held in Switzerland and Austria, the State Opera had predicted that performances were unlikely to be affected, since opera-goers were not interested in football.

Source: http://afp.google.com/article/

Italy Recovers World Cup Spirit to Avoid Euro 2008 Elimination

By Alex Duff

June 18 (Bloomberg) — Italy recovered its World Cup-winning spirit and defensive stability to avoid an early exit at soccer’s European Championship.

Andrea Pirlo and Daniele De Rossi scored in a 2-0 win over 10-man France in Zurich last night in a rematch of the 2006 World Cup final. Italy had to rely on the already-qualified Netherlands beating Romania 2-0 to secure its passage to a June 22 quarterfinal against Spain.

“We had faith,” Italy midfielder Gennaro Gattuso told reporters at the Letzigrund stadium. “We know you don’t win things as individuals, you win as a group. As world champion, we didn’t want to go home early.”

Italy, seeking its first European Championship title in 40 years, rebounded after losing 3-0 to the Netherlands in its opening game on June 9 — its biggest defeat in the tournament’s history. The Italians then drew 1-1 with Romania.

The task was made easier last night when France had defender Eric Abidal red-carded in the 24th minute for fouling Luca Toni as the 6-foot-3 striker steadied himself to shoot. Pirlo converted the resulting penalty to make it 1-0.

France also lost playmaker Franck Ribery in the seventh minute when he hurt himself while attempting a slide tackle on Italy’s Gianluca Zambrotta. The nature of his injury wasn’t immediately clear, team coach Raymond Domenech said.

France was eliminated in the first phase of the tournament for the first time since 1992, raising doubts about Domenech’s position. He declined to comment on his future at a post-game news conference.

France Failure

Domenech, trying to blend veterans like 36-year-old defender Lilian Thuram with young players like Karim Benzema, a 20-year- old striker, failed to lead Les Blues to a victory in any of their three group games.

“It’s unforgivable,” France defender Patrice Evra told reporters. “We had the talent to qualify for the next stage and we didn’t do it.”

Thuram and Claude Makelele, 35, said they will go ahead with plans to retire from international soccer. Thierry Henry, the 30- year-old striker who scored France’s only goal in three games, told reporters he wants to carry on playing for his country.

Italy’s win was based on “hard work and sacrifice,” coach Roberto Donadoni said at a news conference.

“Even as a player I was used to winning things with sweat,” Donadoni, who won five league titles and three European Cups as a midfielder with AC Milan.

De Rossi, who scored Italy’s second goal with a deflected freekick in the 62nd minute, was named man-of-the-match for a performance in which he consistently won the ball in his own half to help the defense.

`Good Control’

“He had good control in midfield and he was a stabilizing factor,” UEFA technical analyst Holger Osieck said. “And then, of course, he was the guy who secured the win.”

Italy also had the Netherlands, coached by Donadoni’s former AC Milan teammate Marco Van Basten, to thank for their qualification. Players on the Italian team bench relied on a television company’s sound engineer sitting nearby for updates on the score of the other Group C game in Berne. Romania would have advanced with a win.

When the Netherlands got its second goal, the substituted Gattuso squirted Donadoni with a water bottle. Italian fans sang “A Bientot” or “See You” to their French counterparts in the sellout crowd of 30,585.

Domenech, France’s coach since 2004, said his team will be back soon.

“You can talk of a catastrophe,” Domenech told reporters. “This team has a real future. I prefer to think about that than my own future.”

To contact the reporter on this story: Alex Duff at the Letzigrund stadium in Zurich at aduff4@bloomberg.net

Source: http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601085&sid=aiYBkkE2BpYY