Legion of Angels News Archive

BEIJING, China (CNN) – He cuts through the water like he’s shredding through the record books at the Summer Olympic Games in Beijing.

U.S. swimmer Michael Phelps won his third gold medal and record-tying ninth of his career on Tuesday morning, breaking his own world record in the 200-meter freestyle.

The American won in a time of 1 minute, 42.96 seconds, lowering his old mark of 1:43.86 set at last year’s world championships in Australia.

It was expected he would face a strong challenge for the gold from the other finalists, but he led from the start, cruising to the wall nearly 2 seconds ahead of silver medallist Park Tae-hwan of South Korea, who finished in 1:44.85. American Peter Vanderkaay earned the bronze in 1:45.14.

Phelps already has nine career gold medals, tying him with four others, including swimmer Mark Spitz and track star Carl Lewis, for the most in Olympics history. He’s got five more chances for gold in Beijing — the next one comes Wednesday.

And he’s just 23.

“We’re not even realizing what an incredible athlete he is,” said Natalie Coughlin, a world-class Olympic swimmer in her own right. “Obviously he’s amazing and he breaks all these world records, but I think being a part of that, we almost take it for granted.”

In one sense, Phelps is much like the element he works in — calm, cool and clear. It’s only when he rips into the water that the waves start.

“I want to do things that no one else in the sport has ever done,” he has said.

Phelps has already done lots of things: 17 world championships and a couple dozen world records. His nine Olympic gold medals include three so far in Beijing — the last one he received Tuesday in the 200-meter freestyle.

“It will remain to be seen where history ultimately places him, but clearly today he is the best swimmer we’ve seen,” said Bob Bowman, Phelps’ coach.

Bowman began coaching Phelps when the swimmer was an 11-year-old who had difficulty focusing outside of the pool and a knack for getting into trouble.

“He was very active and never stopped moving and it was kind of hard to harness that at first,” Bowman said. “It’s a little bit counterintuitive because, even though he was so rambunctious as a young swimmer, when he raced, he was very focused.”

Swimming thousands of miles in a pool will do that to you.

“I think it was something that made me focus,” he said. “I always had dreams of being an Olympian, being a world-record holder, being a professional athlete, being a gold medallist, and I had to focus on those goals to achieve them and I knew that.”

The focus came from year after year of workouts in the pool.

He swam nearly four miles in each workout and often practiced twice a day with hardly a day off. Ironically, it is just that kind of intense work that may have cost Phelps much of his childhood.

“I think he missed out on a normal progression of things, but I wouldn’t say he’s missed anything,” Bowman said. “I would say he would tell you what he’s gained has been a lot better than what he’s missed.”

Phelps agrees.

“I would never trade going to the Olympic Games and standing on top of the medal podium or being able to turn professional or travel all over the world, I would never trade any of it in,” he said.

Phelps finds himself on the verge of diving into history. He has the opportunity to break the Olympics’ most hallowed record and eclipse Marc Spitz’s seven gold medals in the 1972 games.

Even if he gets gold in just half of the eight events he has entered, Phelps will hold the record for the most gold medals in Olympic history and could arguably be called the greatest Olympian ever.

“There are a lot of things that people haven’t done, and I want to change the sport and be the first person to do new things,” Phelps said.

With so much time spent with his head underwater, who can blame him if he likes to stick it in the clouds as well.

Source — CNN

BEIJING, China (AP) – Not all was what it seemed during the spectacular opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics.

Beijing organizers confirmed Tuesday that some of the fireworks display featured prerecorded footage.

Fireworks that burst into the shape of 29 gigantic footprints were shown trudging above the Beijing skyline to the National Stadium near the start of the ceremony.

Though the footprint-shaped fireworks were real, some of the footage shown to television viewers around the world and on giant screens inside the “Bird’s Nest” stadium featured a computer-generated three-dimensional image.

“It was confirmed that previously recorded footage was provided to the broadcasters for convenience and theatrical effects — as in many other big events,” Beijing organizing committee spokesman Wang Wei said. “On the day of the ceremony there were actual footprints of fireworks from the south to the north of the city.

“However, because of the poor visibility of the night, some previously recorded footage may have been used.”

The computerized images were produced by Crystal Digital Technology Co. of Beijing.

“We did our best to create a rendering that would look like the shot was taken live,” company spokesman Lei Ming told the Beijing Times. “Most people could not tell the difference.”

NBC said broadcasters Bob Costas and Matt Lauer told viewers the display was cinematic.

“This is actually almost animation,” Lauer said on the air.

The ceremony won rave reviews around the world and was watched by more than 1 billion people.

In the United States on NBC, the ceremony averaged 34.2 million U.S. viewers, making it the biggest American television event since the Super Bowl.

Source — CNN

BEIJING - China opened a high-speed rail link between Beijing and nearby Tianjin on Friday to provide easy access to Olympic football matches in the booming port city.

The railway is part of China’s heavy investment in new infrastructure for the Olympics, including a new Beijing airport and additional subway lines.

The new train cuts the travel time for the 75-mile (120-kilometer) journey from 70 minutes to about 30 minutes, a notice on the Ministry of Railways said.

The trains, which will travel at speeds up to 217 miles per hour (350 kilometers per hour), will depart from Beijing’s revamped South Railway station — also the departure point for high-speed trains to Shanghai. It is the country’s first high-speed intercity train.

A first-class ticket costs 69 yuan (US$10) and a second-class ticket 58 yuan (US$8.5). Regular service will begin Saturday.

Source — Yahoo!

BEIJING, China (CNN) – On the last weekend before the Olympic Games begin in Beijing, Olympic officials were still wrestling with pollution problems, Internet access, and at least one doping case — albeit an old one.

International Olympic Committee spokeswoman Giselle Davies told a news conference that plans are in place to be able to move events in time if air quality becomes a problem. She said Beijing Olympic organizers and Chinese environment authorities are providing the IOC with daily updates about pollution and weather, which can both have an effect on air quality.

“The two are pretty intrinsically linked,” Davies told a news conference. “We’ve seen in past days that some of the bad skies were actually as much due to an amount of humidity in the air as anything else.”

Chinese officials last month implemented a drastic plan to combat Beijing’s persistent pollution problems, taking half of the city’s more than 3 million vehicles off the road, temporarily closing factories and chemical plants, and suspending all construction work.

Chinese authorities have said they’re confident they can reduce pollution levels but athletes will still have to compete in less-than-healthy air, which can hurt performance.

The capital and surrounding areas of northeastern China have the world’s worst nitrogen dioxide levels, according to satellite images taken by the European Space Agency in 2005.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency says the chemical can cause eye, nose, and throat irritation. It may also cause impaired lung function and increased respiratory infections.

Most days, Beijing is a city shrouded in gray.

Another issue of concern is press freedom after journalists this week discovered some Web sites were unavailable. A spokesman for the Beijing Olympics has said if some sites won’t load it’s because they have spread content banned by Chinese laws, not because officials are restricting the activities of the media.

The spokesman, Sun Weide, pointed out that new Chinese laws and regulations have eased restrictions on journalists. They include filming access in Tiananmen Square, simplified customs requirements for newsgathering equipment, and a “zero-refusal policy” for interview requests with Beijing Olympics officials, he said.

Weide said China would allow “sufficient convenience” on the Internet to allow journalists to do their jobs.

Davies said theIOC has had numerous meetings with Chinese Olympic officials and authorities about the issue, and the Chinese have promised the fullest Internet access possible for journalists.

“We can only welcome the openness and transparency moves made this week and encourage that that can continue,” Davies said.

The IOC said this week it has made no deal about Internet censorship with Chinese authorities.

Davies also said the IOC Executive Board, which met Saturday for its last meeting before the Games, stripped the U.S. men’s 100-meter relay team of the gold medals it won at the 2000 Sydney Olympics after an admission by team member Antonio Pettigrew that he had used performance-enhancing drugs.

The IOC ruled Pettigrew, who returned his medal in June, is now ineligible to compete in Beijing and it did not rule out further sanctions against him.

Board members will decide later how to reallocate the Sydney medals and diplomas, the IOC said.

“Doping is a serious threat to the integrity of sport,” an IOC statement said. “Mr. Pettigrew’s case illustrates that, by choosing to dope, an athlete also jeopardizes his own and his teammates’ achievements.”

Source — CNN

Unless the International Olympic Committee acts fast and makes heaving overweight carry-on bags into overhead airplane bins an official Olympic sport, my chances of visiting Beijing this summer are nil.

But if committee members do finally come to their senses, I’m ready to go. I’ve been practicing my technique on plane trips with multiple connections. And I’ve been prepping for free time in Beijing by gathering advice on how to be a well-mannered traveler in China.

Here’s what I found out:

A new meaning for spit and polish
With 50,000 visitors expected to arrive in Beijing for the 2008 Summer Games in just a few weeks, it’s no surprise that government officials are cleaning up the city and ordering citizens to be on their best behavior. By now, folks should know what that means. After all, as NBC news correspondent Mark Mullen noted in his World Blog, this past February the People’s Republic introduced a “public civility campaign,” complete with slogans and banners, aimed at getting citizens to stop spitting so much, to stop cutting in line and to stop doing other things that Mullen writes, “would not be good manners to describe.”

Like what?
Most Olympic visitors will probably not want to know. Or need to. “Beijing is an international tourist destination with modern hotels, restaurants, bars/clubs and transportation, so it’s not as scary a destination as many may make it out to be,” says John Campbell, a writer and music promoter who has lived in China for eight years. “In the Olympic areas, chances are that many visitors may not actually run into parts of the city untouched by the short-term cleanup” anyway.

That said, Campbell advises visitors to come prepared for “smelly and dirty bathrooms, restaurants that aren’t spic and span, locals who may stare at foreigners, point at foreigners, and in some cases, request to touch a curly head of hair or a beard and don’t see anything wrong with doing so; and fellow diners who talk loudly, drink loudly, slurp their soup and chew with their mouths open …”

Frequent business traveler Vickie Nauman agrees. “Remember that China has been closed off from the rest of the world, so many common practices and customs make sense in China, but they may not make sense to you — at all.”

Her advice: “Have a sense of humor about these differences,” especially when it comes to spitting and toilets. “Ladies may need to squat because toilets are often in the ground. And those toilets may smell unlike anything you’ve experienced before. Bring small packs of tissues, because there’s rarely toilet paper in the bathrooms.”

When it comes to spitting, says Nauman, “People have loud productive coughs and subsequent spitting. It is common to see men, women and even kids hocking one in the streets. Try to ignore it or it will aggravate you at every step.”

Vicky Collins, a freelance television producer on assignment in Beijing for the Olympics, says, “It is true that there’s a lot of spitting going on. Today I applauded a man on the street who was practicing some martial arts with a type of spear. He looked extremely pleased with my praise, gave me thumbs up then hawked a loogie.”

Stay safe: Watch out for topics and taxis
Bonnie Girard has lived in China for at least 21 years and is the President of China Channel Limited. She advises visitors to nix certain topics of conversation. “You risk putting your Chinese colleagues, friends, hosts or acquaintances into a sticky — if not risky — position if you try to force conversations about controversial political or religious issues. Don’t jeopardize someone else’s freedom in the exercise of one’s own.”

Girard also encourages travelers to avoid sticky situations on the road: “China has one of the worst records in the world for fatalities per number of vehicles on the road. Your life is worth more than the embarrassment or the ‘face’ of a bad driver if you happen to be in a car with one. So if you are in a car with a bad driver, say that you have a heart problem or are sick and you need them to slow down and drive sanely. If language is an issue, use sign language. Ham it up.”

Bruce McIndoe, President of iJET Intelligent Risk Systems, says things aren’t any safer or easier for pedestrians. “Getting across the street is like the game ‘Frogger.’ When you go across the street, you’re advancing lane by lane and trying to zigzag your way safely through traffic.” Accidents are so common that McIndoe urges travelers to bring along their own first aid kit and to check if their medical insurance offers coverage while in China. If it doesn’t, he suggests buying a medical insurance policy for travelers. “People need to be psychologically prepared,” says MCindoe. “This is a rough and tumble, grimy environment. It’s not like London or Washington, D.C. Beijing is congested, hot, and dirty. You have to adapt to that and live with that — and come prepared.”

Eat, slurp, and be messy
With more than 30,000 restaurants in the metropolitan Beijing area, visitors will find plenty of places to eat. But Erik Wolf of the International Culinary Tourism Association knows some Western visitors may be alarmed by sanitary conditions they encounter. “Restaurants in Western-style hotels won’t be a problem, but in more authentic restaurants you might see dirty floors and tables.”

And once at the table, says Wolf, don’t be surprised to see and hear people slurping their soup. “The Chinese people kind of lay their heads in the soup bowl. They bring the soup bowl up to their face and bring their heads to the soup bowl. It looked strange to me before someone explained to me what was going on, but it’s to keep soup from splashing or splattering on their shirt.”

Wolf also says visitors should be ready to see bits of food being spit out at the table. “If I had a piece of meat in my mouth that was too grisly or a piece of vegetable that was too tough to eat, I might cover my mouth and remove it. In China, it gets spit right out and goes right on the table.”

And, Wolfe points out, “In China, they don’t waste food. So every part of an animal gets used. It’s a great way to do it, but that means people may end up eating some surprising things.”

Vicky Collins can attest to that. “In restaurants, waiters and waitresses arrive immediately and hover over you until you order. This can be disconcerting to westerners trying to slog their way through a menu they can’t read that’s full of unfamiliar foods. My friend and I ended up ordering donkey the other day — not our intention at all.”

Faced with a situation like that, Wolf says, “You just need to go with an open mind, and realize people eat differently and do things differently. If you think something looks yucky, just don’t eat it.”

Just go with the flow
Exactly, says Jon Campbell of YGTwo Productions. While bathrooms and restaurants may seem dirty and the lines in Beijing may “resemble a swarm of bees rather than a march of ants, this is not to say that Beijing is a rude disgusting mess of humanity.” It’s just different. “And to navigate through this difference requires taking a deep breath, and remembering that.”

Well, maybe not so different. Collins reports that at a live opera performance in Beijing she heard someone talking on their cell phone. As we all know, that happens here in America all the time.

Do you have a question about what is proper etiquette when on the road? Do you have a story about a particularly obnoxious traveler?

Source — MSNBC