Olympic spirit thriving outside stadiums
This article was originally on a blog post platform and may be missing photos, graphics or links. See About archive blog posts.
If you thought all the Olympic action was inside the stadiums, try stopping by the sidewalk on your way in.
“Olympics is my soul! Long live the Olympic Games!” raps Sun Dingguo, a pedicab driver from eastern China who rode his tricycle-slash-mini-mobile-home across 44 Chinese cities in the last year to gather 300,000 signatures of well-wishers for the Beijing Games.
To show that the Olympics has gotten under his skin, he had the logo tattooed onto his chest and belly. Symbols of the various sporting events, made to look like Chinese calligraphy, dance over his back and arms.
He even had the five Olympic rings carved and colored into his crew cut, a high-maintenance choice for a man living on the road.
“My hair was designed by an image consultant who also did my tattoos,” says Sun, 30. “The hair requires a touch-up every seven to 10 days.... All along the way I found stylists willing to help me do it for free.”
So what if his girlfriend doesn’t like the look?
“I am married to the Olympics,” he says without thinking. “I want to give my whole life to the Olympics.”
It’s the kind of outpouring of self-expression and collective pride that has infected people all over China since Beijing finally won the right to host the Summer Olympics. Across the country, the goal is coming up with the most head-turning way of showing they too are part of the Games.
One man in southwestern Guangxi province pierced his head with 2,008 colored needles earlier this summer. Another from Yunnan province tried to build a massive kite with 2,008 wings.
Li Kaiwei from the southern city of Shenzhen walked all the way to Beijing dressed up as Charlie Chaplin, complete with black bowler, walking stick and big shoes.
“This is about young people and their self-expression,” says onlooker Zheng Wenhui, 33, an army veteran from Sichuan province. “Besides, it takes stamina to do what these people did. That is the Olympic spirit.”
Nearby is a man who looks like he escaped from the circus, spinning large metal balls between his meaty fingers and challenging any passerby to match his strength. He has dyed his hair orange and spiked it with what looks like superglue to create a long needle piercing through a pot of grass.
“This is my rendition of the Olympic torch lighting up in the Bird’s Nest,” says Xie Jiajun, referring to the common name for the main Olympic stadium.
Continuing with the hair theme, a Beijing barber simply scraped the shorn locks from the floor of his shop and created a series of replicas that look like the new Olympic stadiums and put them out on display in front of the real things.
“I want to show that an individual strand of hair is weak and easily broken. But pulled together, it can be so much stronger,” says Huang Xin, 32. “People are the same. Our strength comes from our unity.”
-- Ching-Ching Ni