Photo: Flickr: Expatriate Games
"The Olympic Charter ... bears increasingly little resemblance to the reality of the event. That does not mean that the charter is worthless. The values it defines are still worthy of aspiring to.
Article six reads: "The Olympics are competitions between athletes in individual or team events, not between countries."
Of all the sentiments enshrined in the charter, this is by far the most abused."
The Beijing Games are a place of steely schmaltz, where nothing goes wrong, ever... They are the place where the organising committee explained of the ordinary Chinese: "Everybody is happy. That is a fact."
It's basically like The Matrix, but with less cool clothes. And nothing makes you wish you hadn't taken the red pill like seeing volunteers, coralled into filling empty seats at a venue, unfurling a banner reading "Nothing can stop the power of China". By crikey, they need to work on their bannercraft. You just yearn for the sort of sentiment that can adorn the flags at England away games. "Don't go into labour Hayley" - that sort of thing.
For all their slick management and the great sporting display, it should be said that China's Games have been spectacularly, creepily humourless. There has been not one iota of good natured fun-poking in the national media, not a single comedy montage on the 18 state TV channels dedicated to reverential coverage of China's big moment. Nothing has been allowed to interfere with the official line. The effect is oddly static, as though the people's joy is being handed to them like a stone tablet, instead of being a democratised, roots-up explosion.
As we prepare to turn the corner into the next Olympiad, Britain is starting to look like the perfect contrasting destination for the old torch. These Games have provided in-stadia thrills, but how much richer the Olympics will be for taking place in a city of irreverence and cynicism, as well as enthusiasm...
We may not have 2,000 perfectly synchronised drummers, but we've got a nation of cussed folk dancing to their own beats.
If Beijing's Games were a state's Olympics then London's ought to be a democracy's - the chance to humanise them a bit more.
One protester who managed to break through the police cordon, David Allen said his anger at the parading of the torch through the capital flared at the sight of British sporting stars being guarded in the streets of London by Chinese security men. "What really got my goat was our sporting heroes being surrounded by the Chinese security heavies guarding the torch," he said. "It makes us complicit in the regime's repression. You have to ask, 'Where were these security men last week?' Beating up people in the villages of China, no doubt."
Employed by the Beijing Olympic Organising Committee (BOCOG), the "flame protection squad" was formed in August 2007 to safeguard the fire 24 hours a day on its 137,000-km (85,130-mile), 130-day relay, state media have reported.
Its members were picked from the ranks of the People's Armed Police, the security force spun off from the army that is responsible for riot control and domestic stability. Tens of thousands of "wujing", as they are called in Chinese, have been deployed to Tibet and neighbouring areas to quash recent unrest.
