The Olympic Green finally blooms
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BEIJING -- For a week after the opening ceremony, it felt like a ghost town in the Olympic Green areas surrounding three of the major Olympic venues -- National Indoor Stadium (gymnastics), the Bird’s Nest (track) and the Water Cube (swimming and diving).
You would walk to the morning finals in swimming, going right past the gymnastics venue, and encounter no one else but media and Olympic organizing committee folk -- volunteers, security personnel, etc. When you got inside the Water Cube and saw it filled with spectators, you wondered if they suddenly had popped out from the floor under their seats.
That all changed when track and field began.
Suddenly, people filled the Olympic Green, nearly all of them Chinese citizens acting absolutely delighted at being there. Everyone seemed to stop for a picture with the Olympic caldron in the background (there was a platform that must have been put there for that purpose, so perfect was its position in front of the torch). Children beamed as brightly as the sun that has shone the last two days, revealing all the mountains that hover in the far distance of panoramas from the Olympic Green.
Only folks with tickets or credentials are allowed into the Olympic Green, which has seemed like an armed camp at times, so tight is security. (I mean, was it really necessary to have armored personnel carriers at both ends of the main press center one day?). It would be so much more fun if the place could be filled with the ticket-less who simply want to share in this historic experience.
But you take fun when you can get it around here. And it has been a ball just walking to the Bird’s Nest and seeing smiles on tens of thousands of people around you.
-- Philip Hersh
A torch relay sculpture in the Olympic Green is a popular place for copy cats to be photographed while taking part in the excitement surrounding the the Summer Olympics in Beijing, China on Saturday, August 16, 2008. Chicago Tribune Photo by Scott Strazzante
