Some observations on my first Olympic experience

I was given a pair of free tickets to the finals of the day's judo on Sunday: my first (and perhaps only?) chance to experience an Olympic event directly.

The venue - stunning! A huge, brand spanking new gymnasium built for one of the capital's middle-ranking Universities.

Overall organization - pretty impressive. Everything seemed to run very smoothly, and there were lots of volunteers around to help with any problems anyone encountered.

The volunteers - ubiquitous, and very helpful. Two of the guys on the campus front gate even insisted on escorting my companion half-way to the venue itself with their umbrellas, because it was pouring down and he'd been caught without one (only half-way, mind you!). And most of them seemed to have at least the bare minimum of English necessary to point you in the direction of the toilets or sell you a Snickers bar.

Accessibility - not so good. The gymnasium is right in the middle of a VAST and labyrinthine campus (the newly rebranded USTB - University of Science & Technology, Beijing; they finally realised that this made a better acronym than BUST...... or STUB..... or BUTS), and the signage was nearly non-existent. It's not anywhere near a subway station either. And - in the rain - there were no cabs to be had. (Luckily, I was familiar enough with this part of town to be able to locate an appropriate bus stop for us to use; but there were a lot of people - Chinese and foreigners - forlornly trudging down the road in the pouring rain, with little idea how they were going to get home.)

The security lines - very quick and untroublesome, but not at all secure: I fear the balance between risk reduction and inconvenience that I highlighted a while back has - strangely - gone way too far in the direction of convenience here. OK, this is one of the smaller venues, and maybe they figure that no-one would try anything here because all the competitors (and most of the judges, and a fair few of the audience) could rip your head off in a moment if you did. I may have more to say on this in a later post (not that anybody reads my humble little blog anyway, but I do fret that it might seem irresponsible to highlight the holes in the security on a public forum - you never know who might be reading, and picking up ideas).

Attendance - so-so. Perhaps some people were put off by the rain. I would guess the venue only holds about 4,000 or 5,000, and probably wasn't much more than half or two-thirds full; but most of the spectators had been cannily directed to the stands opposite the TV cameras to give the impression that it was a fairly packed house.

Crowd behaviour - mostly quite good-natured; although, with 80 or 90% of them being Chinese, the potential for intimidation is very disconcerting. The IOC's rules that supposedly outlaw the display of national flags by spectators were not being enforced. The mood was buoyed up by the gold medal win of Xian Dongmei for China in the Women's 52kg weight division - oh yes, the hometown boys'n'gals went crazy over that! My friend and I happened to be sat in a 'Japanese section' (quite a strong contingent - they invented the sport, after all); and the response of the rest of the audience when a Japanese contender came on was, well, not openly hostile, but conspicuously muted. I do worry that things might have turned a little ugly if a Chinese and a Japanese had gone head-to-head in a close final, but that didn't happen in this session. I do find it a bit alarming, too, how much the CCP's view of international relations affects the attitudes of ordinary citizens in situations like this: a couple of DPRK competitors were rapturously received by the local audience; a Frenchman was greeted by a fairly stony silence (except from a small but vociferous group of his own countrymen).

All in all, though, a pretty impressive show from the organizers. It's just the security issue that bugs me: after all the overkill of closing down bars and live music events, and putting tens of thousands of bodies out on the streets - well, the security at the venues still seems to be frighteningly lax.