Olympic update Beijing: 1 day to go London: 1450 days to go
The are two Summer Olympics in the next four years. The Beijing Games open tomorrow, while the London Games will be nearly finished come four years time. Can you stand the excitement? It's amazing how a couple of weeks of sport can dominate the global media stage, and we Londoners have all this prolonged media attention still to come. Everything that China's going through now we can no doubt expect at the bottom of my street in 2012 - intense scrutiny, angry demonstrations, questionable security, dodgy atmospheric conditions, dopey athletes and cute schoolkids waving pretty coloured ribbons. Bring it on, I say.
Actually the Beijing Olympics have already started - hadn't you noticed? The women's football tournament kicked off yesterday with wins for China, Canada, Norway and North Korea. Not that you care. It just goes to show that nobody's really interested in the lower-level sports, not unless there's some home nation talent taking part with a sporting chance of a medal. Will you be tuning into the men's team gymnastics in the early hours of Tuesday morning, or setting your Sky+ to record every last arrow in the archery preliminaries? I think not.
But I'll be keeping a closer eye than usual on Olympic goings-on in the Chinese capital. Not for the sport, you understand, but for the infrastructure. How big is a typical basketball arena? How easy is it to stand close to the marathon as it jogs by? Is it worth going to watch the equestrian events or do they look better in edited highlights? And, most poignantly, what do you think North Beijing used to look like before the authoritiesbulldozed acres of former hutongs and built a new stadium in their place? Ah, it may all look splendid on the television, but some of us realise there's always a priceto be paid on the ground.
They do things very differently in China but, for those on London's Olympic organising committee, the next fortnight is their last chance to observe how to run a spectacular international sports extravaganza. Let's hope they learn well, from the triumphs as well as the mistakes, so that my local Olympics works out as optimally as possible. Hmm, what to pick from the planned schedule of events for 7th August 2012 - the table tennis finals, the women's triathlon or the showjumping in Greenwich Park? I can only hope that, come the first week of August, the weather in 2012 will be rather better than in 2008. Ah yes, it could still all go so uncontrollablywrong...
Olympic update
