Everybody I met, once I told them I’m from Beijing, expressed interest in the 2008 Olympics. They all want to come and watch the game. However, when I read an article from the New York Times, I am not so sure the Marathon athletes are as excited.
The article is about training to compete in a marathon held in a hot, humid and polluted city. You can read it here.
The article is long and only towards the end it brought up something I knew was true but never was willing to accept. Here’s some excerpts:

“Even if the distance runners in the Beijing Olympics eat perfectly, though, they are going to face the problem of air pollution.
In March, Randy Wilber, an exercise physiologist with the United States Olympic Committee, went to Beijing to measure the air quality at training and competition sites.
“I walked around the city for over a week,” he said.
The air was not good. It had high levels of carbon monoxide, which significantly decreases the amount of oxygen that blood can carry. Added to that were high levels of ground-level ozone, nitrogen dioxide, sulfur dioxide and particulate matter, all of which can inflame and constrict the air passages in the lungs and set off asthma attacks even in people who have never had them.
“When you add in heat and humidity, with the heat index you can expect a sensation, a feeling of 90 to 95 degrees when you are outside,” Dr. Wilber said. “With prolonged exposure and moderate physical activity, you will be on the borderline between caution and extreme caution.”
The physical activity the athletes will be doing could hardly be described as moderate, however.
Parts of the 26-mile course are particularly dirty. “If any of you have driven through the steel mill district of Gary, Ind., that’s what it reminded me of,” Dr. Wilber told the meeting participants.
Air pollution can bring on exercise-induced asthma, even in athletes who never knew they were susceptible, Dr. Wilber said. But the runners cannot simply show up at the race and whip out an inhaler.”
My initial reaction to the analogy is total shock, because I know Gary is the murder capital of the US and I could not accept simply by the nature of the two cities, one the capital of my motherland and where I grew up in, the other the rotten heartland and represents everything that could go wrong in capitalism. (I found a picture of Gary .) Now I haven’t been to Gary, IN, but have been to Hammond, IN, which is pretty similar. While I couldn’t believe he made the comparison, once I started to put my emotion aside and think about it, I must admit it was not an unfair analogy. I began to worry about my parents, who still live in Beijing. The athletes only need to stay in Beijing for a couple of weeks at most, but they are living there and breathing the air every second.