China plans to reuse its venues

BEIJING — Where Olympians ran, swam and slept, Chinese organizers see pop concerts, a public pool, soccer and luxury apartments.

Authorities are scrambling to make sure the 91,000-seat Bird's Nest stadium and other venues are put to good use after the Olympics and September's Paralympics. They want to avoid the fate of other Olympic hosts that were left with empty, debt-burdened facilities.

The NBA and private developers have been signed up to run stadiums and arenas. The Water Cube swimming center, due to become a public pool, raised money by licensing its name for a bottled water brand. The Bird's Nest is taking bids from companies for naming rights.

"We believe that post Games and for a long period of time, these venues will be used pretty well," said Du Wei, vice president of the Beijing Olympic Economy Research Association, a group linked to the Beijing organizers. "The management companies will immediately open them up for public use."

Still, Du and others say it could take decades for the Bird's Nest and other venues to pay for themselves.

"We can't expect in the short term all the investment will be regained right away," Du said.

Beijing built 12 permanent and eight temporary venues and refurbished 11 others at a cost of $1.9 billion, according to the city government.

The Bird's Nest will be the highest-profile test case for the city's ability to make them financially viable.

The Water Cube was paid for by donations from ethnic Chinese abroad, making it cheaper to convert to public use. But in a city where the average income per person is $4,100 a year, managers say ticket prices will be kept low, which leaves less for upkeep of its pool and its futuristic bubble-wrap exterior.

"If we rely only on swimming pool tickets, we certainly will lose money," Kang Wei, a deputy manager of the government company that owns the pool, said in comments on the Beijing organizers' Web site. "So we will have other products to guarantee the operation in the long run."

The Water Cube raised money by licensing its name for use on swimsuits and on bottled water made from Canadian icebergs.

Beijing began charting the venues' future almost as soon as it was awarded the games in 2001.

Athlete housing was designed from the start as luxury apartments, with swimming pools, tennis courts, coffee shops and shopping. Some venues were built as additions to universities. The coastal city of Qingdao plans to convert its yachting venue into a public marina and government school for China's future Olympic sailors.

Athletes' sacrifices

If anybody feels a pang of jealousy over China's haul of Olympic gold medals, they need only pause to consider what the athletes went through to get them.

The only mother on China's team, Xian Dongmei told reporters after she won her gold medal in judo that she had not seen her 18-month-old daughter in one year, monitoring the girl's growth only by webcam. Another gold medalist, weightlifter Cao Lei, was kept in such seclusion training for the Olympics that she wasn't told her mother was dying. She found out only after she had missed the funeral.

Chen Ruolin, a 15-year-old diver, was ordered to skip dinner for one year to keep her body sharp as a razor slicing into the water. The girl weighs 66 pounds.

"To achieve Olympic glory for the motherland is the sacred mission assigned by the Communist Party central," is how Chinese sports minister Liu Peng put it at the beginning of the games.

While U.S. team members frequently hauled their parents to Beijing, most Chinese parents watched the games on television. Chinese athletes train as many as 10 hours a day, and even the children have only a few hours a day for academic instruction.

"You have no control over your own life. Coaches are with you all the time. People are always watching you, the doctors, even the chefs in the cafeteria. You have no choice but to train so as not to let the others down," gymnast Chen Yibing told Chinese reporters last week after winning a gold medal on the rings. He said he could count the amount of time he had spent with his parents "by hours ... very few hours."

The Chinese sports system was inspired by the Soviet Union. China's future champions are drafted as young children for state-run boarding schools. Scouts trawl through the population of school children for potential champions, plucking out the extremely tall for basketball, the slim and double-jointed for diving — regardless of whether they know how to swim.

"I wanted to be a ballet dancer, but they said ping pong was right for me," said Lu Lu, a 20-year-old player at the Xuanwu Sports Academy in Beijing.

After Beijing was chosen in 2001 to host this summer's games, China's sports authorities launched Project 119 (after the number of medals available in athletics, canoeing, sailing, rowing and swimming that were not Chinese strengths) and assigned promising young athletes to focus exclusively on these sports some of which they never had heard of.

The final tally gave China 51 gold medals to the United States' 36.

"The sports systems of the United States and China are very accurate metaphors for our societies. China is a society run by engineers, based on planning and coordination and central planning," said Jamie Metzl, executive vice president of the New York-based Asia Society and an ironman triathlete. "The state is the supreme entity and the role of the individual is to support the state."

Despite the validation provided by the Olympic medal count, China probably is heading in the direction of a more open sports system where the athletes have more freedom. Having tasted celebrity and the wealth it can bring, many athletes have balked at remaining within a system where they are treated like rank-and-file soldiers.

Notes

• Fidel Castro on Monday defended the Cuban tae kwon do athlete who kicked a referee in the face at the Olympics, saying Angel Matos was rightfully indignant over his disqualification from the bronze-medal match.

Tae kwon do officials want Matos and his coach banned for life from the sport. But Castro expressed "our total solidarity" for both Matos and his coach, Leudis Gonzalez.

Matos and was disqualified for taking more than his one minute of injury time. He angrily questioned the call, pushed a judge and then pushed and kicked referee Chakir Chelbat of Sweden, who needed stitches to repair his lip.

• China on Monday deported a British woman and a German man who took part in a protest during the Games, officials said, hours after eight American activists were sent home during the closing ceremony. Mandie McKeown, 41, and Florien Norbu Gyanatshang, 30, were part of a group of four who last week unfurled a Tibetan flag and shouted "Free Tibet" south of the National Stadium, one of the main Olympics venues.