SMACKDOWN! Is Beijing an apt site for the 2008 Olympics?
Jeff Henderson on Beijing: The Wheeze of Victory
On July 13, 2001, the International Olympic Committee awarded the 2008 Olympic Games to Beijing, China. Friday the 13th, a dubious date given the irony of awarding the world's greatest sporting event to a country that has sacrificed environmental and social health in order to be in a position to play host.
The announcement ended seven years of meetings, assessments and lobbying. It marked the start to seven more years of planning and construction, a flurry of activity in a country already furious with activity.
Beijing is undergoing an industrial revolution on a scale never before seen. The equivalent to five cities the size of Columbus, Ohio, are going up every year, and the growth has created an insatiable appetite for raw materials and energy. It is the epitome of unsustainable growth-environmental destruction is seen as one price China has to pay for prosperity. As a Chinese analogy goes, "The nation is a construction site and everything is not tidy."
In awarding the Olympic Games to Beijing, IOC members expressed hope that the Olympics would open China to the world, improve human rights and speed social and economic reforms. "We are totally aware at the IOC, there is one issue on the table ... and that is human rights," IOC director general Francois Carrard said that day. "Human rights is a very serious issue in the entire world. It is not up to the IOC to interfere in this issue, but we are taking the bet that seven years from now, we sincerely and dearly hope we will see many changes."
Much was said about human rights, and it is debatable whether significant changes have occurred in that area since 2001. But one issue that was not in the headlines then has wriggled into them now: pollution. Should China have been given the bid for an event that celebrates the human body's ability to perform at the highest level, when environmental conditions make that nearly impossible? I say no.
The Olympic Games have long strived to remain above politics and the internal affairs of host countries. But when those policies and conditions threaten to jeopardize the sports themselves, they need to be addressed. Rather than rewarding China with the economic spoils of Olympic green, the IOC could have picked a different city and sent a message that a clean world goes hand in hand with a fit body and sound mind.
Now being billed as the "Smog Olympics," Beijing's organizers are beginning to discuss the possibility of certain endurance events being postponed or cancelled due to air pollution. Despite spending billions of dollars on projects meant to lessen the city's staggering air pollution, the recovery is not going fast enough. The city's air remains saturated with smog two to three times the maximum allowed by the World Health Organization, and the United Nations Environmental Program is particularly worried about the high levels of small particulate matter.
On one of the final days of 2007, Beijing's air was so bad that residents were warned to stay indoors and visibility was reduced to a few hundred yards. For a marathon runner who breathes ten times the oxygen of a normal citizen going about his day, this is not good news. And for a triathlete, who needs to have clean water in addition to clean air, the situation is even worse.
Every four years we are treated to "the human drama of athletic competition," as ABC's Wide World of Sports used to say. We need to stage this drama in a city committed to health for all of its citizens, all of the time, not a city intent on cleaning up its mess just before the world watches. These places do exist. Hosting an Olympic Games should be a reward, not a chance to open markets and sell merchandise.
Olympic athletes train years for fleeting seconds of opportunity. The 100 meters on the track lasts all of 10 seconds, the 50 freestyle in the pool 22 seconds. To ask competitors to freeze their lives in pursuit of the perfect race, and then handicap their chances by introducing the possibility of delay or cancellation, that is an injustice.
Beijing may be in the midst of building a city for the 21st Century, but her abuses of Mother Nature for the past 30 years are not so quickly swept aside. There may not be a rug big enough to hide it all come August.
Timothy Carlson counters: Beijing is the right place for the 2008 Summer Olympics
Jeff, my honorable and esteemed colleague, will arm himself in gigabytes of Googleized data to declaim with passionate alarums that the IOC never should have chosen Beijing and, given its catastrophic mistake, assert that it's not too late for the IOC to pull out to save the lungs of 15,000 Olympic athletes.
I bravely assert that for precisely those same reasons, for the good of the earth and the health of the citizens of this beleaguered planet, Beijing is precisely the only place to hold the 2008 Summer Olympics. And, I might add, for a few other more mundane reasons.
Let us stipulate the facts that have come tumbling down the portals of Western media like The New York Times, Financial Times of London, the Los Angeles Times and several dozen environmental blogs ...
China has a population of 1.3 billion-20 percent of the planet. Beijing has a population of 15 million-with a bullet. With the rise of the Chinese economy, the urban Chinese have choked Beijing's streets with 3 million cars-increasing by 2,000 more a day. The Chinese's energy needs-two-thirds dependent on coal-has made their economy the world's powerhouse, catching up like a rocket to the Western leaders. That gain is fueled by mid-20th century technology such as dirty coal plants, cars using bad gasoline and inadequate emission controls. Sulfur dioxide and nitrogen dioxides spewed by the coal-fired electrical plants blanket neighbors like Japan and Korea with acid rain. As China's communist roots evolve to arm the nation's huge population with capitalism as a peacetime weapon, the totalitarian regime enjoys surfing on its economic surge into a worldwide power.
As a result, of this huge economic surge, China is scheduled to overtake the increasingly ecologically awakened U.S. in a year or two. As a byproduct, China is like a teenage smoker with emphysema-the costs of pollution have skyrocketed long before it's ready to curtail economic development. As a result, only 1 percent of China's 560 million urban population breathes air considered safe by the European Union. Only Cairo, among world capitals, had worse air quality as measured in particulates. China is the leading source of sulfur dioxide pollution globally. China had 400,000 deaths per year due to outdoor air pollution, a number that's headed upward quickly.
In July and August 2007, Beijing was hit by days of heavy smog despite a plan to take up to half the city's 3 million cars off the road on alternate days. Beijing claimed to the IOC it would take extreme measures to cut pollution, citing that these would be the Green Games. Closer to the mark was the yellow and green glow aura of smog.
Optimists cite China's reported investment of $60 billion to stage the Olympics-four times the prior amounts that broke the bank at Athens. With that kind of investment for an Olympic calling card bragging up your country, the thinking goes China would unleash its totalitarian control and stop all factories and coal plants and cars for the month of the Games so athletes wouldn't be choking. But recently, Beijing officials announced that neither would it require factories to shut down during the Olympics nor would it require drivers to stay home. United States Olympic Committee officials hatched a plan to put carbon-filtered masks on Olympic athletes in training to keep their lungs clean during 2007 endurance sports, including triathlon. The evaluation: It kept the dust out of the lungs but athletes could not train nor race at anywhere near full throttle. The IOC remains cautiously optimistic, but the marathoners and 10,000-meter runners are bracing for a bad day in Beijing.
Meanwhile, Chinese government officials have put a full-court press on meteorologists and climatologists to try cloud-seeding experiments to bring particulate-washing rain on 08-08-08 and for the two weeks thereafter.
So am I going belly up to Jeff's point of view? NO.
My position requires some suppositions and makes me vulnerable to vicious second-guessing. But here goes.
I predict the Chinese government won't want to take a chance on killing athletes with charcoal air and will in fact reverse course and basically shut down cars, trucks, factories and coal-fired power plants for the entire month of August. Since the Chinese are already spending $60 billion on this athletic extravaganza, what's an extra $10 billion in lost production? If they succeed in cloud seeding, I'll pray they don't whip up a monsoon.
And, if anyone thinks that this is asking too much, I point to the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles-the city was feared for its smog and traffic but great propaganda beforehand sent millions of Angelenos on summer vacation, leaving the streets empty and skies clear.
Second, I predict Chinese officials will realize in the midst of this big show that short-term profits realized with dirty power, dirty gas and dirty factories will cripple the Chinese juggernaut as surely as the cost of the Afghan adventure took the U.S.S.R. out of the Cold War. This can be nothing but a good sign-perhaps a tipping point-in the battle on global warming.
Third, I predict that tamping down the Chinese economic engine will keep neighboring countries acid rain-free and healthy. Cutting down the pollution will also save money and perhaps lessen the Chinese temptation to use the rampant pollution as a cheap birth-control method.
Fourth, if the air remains as dirty as Athens or Los Angeles, it will still be better than the Black Rain-Blade Runner dystopian skies that seem imminent in China today. Hopefully, competing nations will keep their endurance athletes out of the Beijing smelting pot until race day and asthmatic reactions will stay at normal levels and won't become an epidemic.
Fifth, everyone should recognize that the Olympics are a global political festival and business bonanza wearing spandex and the suits of the IOC big wigs. As such, it's vulnerable to the efforts of evil regimes like the Nazis to use them as a propaganda prop-but they also inspire countries to be on their best behavior and at least attempt to emulate the better humanistic values of sportsmanship and brotherly love. Case in point-the Chinese signed on Steven Spielberg to cook up a super-duper opening and closing ceremony. But when human rights activist Mia Farrow heard about that, she put pressure on Spielberg to withhold his services until the Chinese put pressure on the Sudanese government to stop funding the massacre in Sudan.
Ultimately, let's say the Chinese ignore the warnings, pollution is unbearable and major countries boycott for the health of their athletes. What better advertisement for taking global warming and pollution controls and energy savings seriously? And, to avoid tragic truncations to the careers of the Olympic athletes, I would wish that the endurance sports events were relocated to another site-preferable to a seaside, less-congested area of China.
Not to put the Olympic athletes as pawns in the political games as Jimmy Carter did. After all, the Olympic ideal can still be a magnificent affirmation of our humanity. Sad exceptions have abounded-the massacre of students prior to the Mexico Olympics in 1968, the massacre of the Israeli team in Munich in 1972, the U.S. boycott of Moscow in 1980 and the Russian boycott of Los Angeles in 1984. But honestly, this is a moveable feast meant to eventually alight in all the corners of the planet. And if the skies remain clear, the Chinese people and the nation's ancient culture are magnificent and complex and certainly worthy of the spotlight the media will throw on it.
Hopefully, the greatest threat to the endurance athletes will be the heat and the humidity. No worse than Athens in 2004 or Korea in 1988. But no matter if athletes most fervently wish that the Games would be played in a moderate climate in uncrowded stadiums under clear skies far from the population centers, the Games will always belong to the world as it is. The miracle is that they sometimes make governments, countries, races and athletes rise to the best that humanity is capable of. That is and will remain the hope of every Olympic Games until humans learn how to conserve their beloved Earth-or eventually incinerate their planet and all her resources.
As always, we want to hear what you have to say! Yea or nay to Beijing? Hit us up at mjuntti@insideinc.com.
