A green Olympics?

by Tom Hughes on 07.08.08

The Olympics are almost here and after four years of waiting, people are holding their breath.

But rather than exhaling and grabbing a fresh lungful after the pageantry of the opening ceremony, it may be better to keep it bottled up for another month or so. Alarming pictures coming out of Beijing ahead of the games show a fug of air pollution hovering ominously over the city.

The Chinese capital is one of the most polluted cities on earth, and there has been daily speculation about the smog. Pictures from the city suggest that the air quality has of late yo-yoed back and forth from impenetrable pea-soupers, to sparkling alpine freshness.

The US team arrived, very pointedly, with masks over their face to protect their delicate athletes’ lungs from the pollution, and fears over the quality of the air have forced out several athletes, including men’s marathon world record holder Haile Gebreselassie, who decided it would be too much for his asthma.

Even the International Olympic Committee (IOC) admitted in the run up to the games that the air quality would not be ideal for the events, and it seems unlikely that world records will be broken in the longer distance events. Olympic chief Jacques Rogge was himself forced to concede that there could be a health risk for athletes, suggesting certain events would have to be postponed.

All this does not sit well with Olympian ideals. So much for “Citius, Altius, Fortius“. And when “Green Olympics” is one of the three main ideals of Beijing 2008, you have to ask if the IOC got it right.

To the Chinese government’s credit, it has produced a raft of initiatives to make the best of a difficult situation. This includes some staggering architecture which uses technology to the advantage of energy efficiency, neatly delivering on one of the other Beijing 2008 ideals: a “high-tech Olympics”.

The Beijing National Stadium, also known as the Bird’s Nest due to its seemingly twig-lined superstructure, uses an ingenious system to irrigate its grass, while the Water Cube aquatics centre harnesses the power of the sun to heat its water.

All very impressive, and weirdly beautiful.

But, of course, this is just the tip of the iceberg for an economy which has exploded into life over the past few years since its Olympic bid became reality, with new wealth, new buildings and new cars generated on an alarming scale.

In the run up to the games, around one million vehicles have been taken off Beijing’s roads through a desperate effort to cut down on smog by banning number plates ending in an odd number one day, and those ending in an even digit the next.

But despite this, an estimated 1,000 brand-new cars join the same teeming streets each day; a by-product of the country’s wealth and an aspiration among its people for a Western lifestyle.

Still, we can all enjoy the next few weeks for the triumphs and despairs they bring on the track, field, court or course. The spotlight will surely not move entirely away from China once the games are over, and the landscape of Beijing and the country at large will continue to transform at an incredible pace: exciting and worrying in equal measure.

IMAGE by Flickr user angus_mac_123