By Charles Whelan
BEIJING: China kicked off the final year countdown to the Beijing Olympics yesterday with fireworks and a spectacular ceremony on dazzlingly lit Tiananmen Square.
With 10,000 invited guests on hand and millions more watching live on television across the nation and around the globe, the crowd cheered as a special clock hit the moment marking one year before the 2008 Games begin.
More than 100 singers belted out "We Are Ready", Beijing's anthem for the coming year, as part of a series of song and dance routines and other performances that also featured Hong Kong movie star Jackie Chan.
International Olympic Committee chief Jacques Rogge took to the stage at the ceremony, pledging that next year's Games would prove to be an international showcase for the emerging power.
"Beijing and China will not only host a successful Games for the world's premier athletes, but will also provide an excellent opportunity to discover China — its history, culture and people," Rogge told the crowd.
Rogge and many others are saying the Beijing Olympics is already one of the best-prepared ever, with construction of 31 top-quality venues to be completed well ahead of time.
But Rogge earlier revealed that not everything was going as well as planned, and that the IOC was willing to take the unprecedented step of postponing events at the Games if the city's notorious pollution was particularly bad.
"We are going to put the athletes' health first. We'll have contingency plans in action," he told CNN.
He said that pollution should not pose a problem for athletes competing in sports with a short duration.
"But definitely the endurance sports, like the cycling race where you have to compete for six hours, these are examples of competitions that might be postponed or delayed to another day," he said.
Beijing is one of the world's most polluted cities but Chinese officials have stressed repeatedly that it is doing everything it can to ensure the 10,000 athletes will be able to compete next year in clean air.
It is closing many polluting factories and intends to order more than one million cars — about a third of the city's vehicles -- off the road during the Games.
Yesterday's festivities began when a million Chinese performed traditional tai chi and other exercises in parks throughout Beijing, while hockey and rowing test events got under way at the venues that will hold their Olympic competitions. Eight is a lucky number in Chinese culture, and the Games will begin on August 8, 2008 at 8:08 pm.
But while the fireworks had been expected to start at 8:08 on Wednesday night, the sky lit up at 8:00pm sharp.
China's leadership is attaching an extraordinary level of importance to the world's premier sports event, seeing it as a coming-out party to mark the rise of a new and influential global player.
But the Olympics is equally being seen by rights groups and activists as an unprecedented opportunity to pressure China's communist rulers, and they have sought this week to take some of the shine off the countdown celebrations.
Already this week overseas activists, US lawmakers and domestic dissidents have made headlines by targeting the Chinese government over issues such as Tibet, political oppression, media freedoms and the violence in Darfur.
China yesterday detained two more foreigners campaigning to end Chinese rule over Tibet after they came to Beijing to produce an unauthorised blog, BeijingWideOpen.org, according to the Free Tibet Campaign. (AFP) |
