It will be a tough act to follow
BEIJING - We now know what can be accomplished by a nation of 1.3 billion people imbued with nationalistic pride and governed by a no-nonsense leadership.
Such a nation can run the most efficient, if not necessarily the most joyful and spontaneous Olympics yet known. Such a nation can trot out an endless stream of blue-shirted volunteers (at least three people for every one that was needed and three more behind them, just in case). Such a nation can send out battalions of skilled and dedicated athletes in more disciplines than any previous country ever had mastered. Such a nation can justify its presence on this earth to itself, while announcing to everyone else, without specifically saying so, that it is the future and the 21st century will inevitably be theirs.
Presenting itself to the world with a stupendous opening ceremonies that told the story of its honorable and ancient civilization in the most modern of technological ways, China put on an Olympics that will not soon be surpassed. Who else will commit $43 billion to the cause? Surely not England, which has taken its notes and which now intends to impress the world four years hence in a far different way. But you must pity the Brits, who will be compared unfavorably with the Chinese the minute the first 2012 bus is a minute late and as soon as travelers get into taxis that don't have fares, making one think he or she has been transported back in time to 1947.
China got what it wanted from these Games. With the exception of the baseball and softball facilities (which are probably being torn down as you read this), their venues were showered with praise in about a hundred languages. The Bird's Nest? Incroyable. The Water Cube? Magnifico. The Olympic Basketball Gymnasium? NBA quality. On and on it went. The archers raved about the archery place. The shooters raved about the pistol range. The Chinese had done their homework and they had gotten it all right.
The Olympic Village was, of course, proclaimed the Best Ever.
The Chinese were keen on showing a world that had grown up reading about its 19th-century domination by Europeans and its 20th-century invasion by the Japanese that its days of being a punching bag were over. China is now a Can-Do nation with a growing economy, and its people - especially its young people - are buying into the program. A survey conducted by the Pew Research Center reveals that as these Games began China's people had ranked first among 24 nations in their optimism about their country's future. Just six years ago, 48 percent of Chinese people said they were "satisfied" with the future direction of their country. The number now has jumped to 84 percent. Small wonder leader Hu Jintao and his fellow Chinese biggies spend a bit of each day patting each other on the back.
Showing the world they know how to stage an event in comfort and style is fine, but Part B for the Chinese is equally important. They want to monopolize the hardware.
You might as well get it in your head that China will dominate the medal count in every future Olympics. This will be the last time the US, or anyone else, has more total medals. The Chinese have too many people, too much organization, too much money available and too much of a focus on athletic success for anyone to compete - if anyone really should.
We know that many of the Chinese athletes pay a fearful price for their success. Plucked from their homes at tender ages by roving talent scouts, many of the young Chinese athletes are forced to exchange a mother's hug and a father's encouragement for a rigid life in a sports academy where they do nothing but eat/sleep/train 24/7/365. Scores of medal winners have not seen their parents in two years. One little gold medal-winning girl in something or other was absolutely terrified at the winner's press conference, having nothing to say. Friends revealed she had not been home in four years.
Americans aren't going to do this in order to win gold medals, nor should they.
Our national focus is never going to be on Olympic sports, which, by and large, we take off the shelf every four years, indulge for a two-week period, and then place back on the shelf. We're about football on autumn weekends, baseball pennant races, NBA playoffs, and March Madness with its accompanying office pool (Shh!). China has internal professional sports leagues, but they are small potatoes.
"In this country," explains American Tom McCarthy, president of Beijing International Group and a two-decade follower of Asian sports, "the first priority is the Olympics. Then it's the National Games. Then it's the Provincial Games. And then it's the Asian Games. The pro leagues are nowhere near that level of interest."
It's important to remember that what visitors saw in Beijing - an enormous city that reminded me in its pure size and its endless clusters of high-rises as Houston on steroids - is but a sliver of a very large country in which hundreds of millions in outlying provinces live little differently than their forefathers did 200, 300, or 500 years ago. There are many Chinas, just as there are many Americas, and I was told by one journalist who has lived in this country for six years and traveled extensively to the outer regions, that this is an ethnically and socially fractured country in which many millions resent the ruling Han Chinese and urbanites everywhere scorn their country cousins, reserving for them, he says, "A word that is every bit as insulting as the N-word in America."
That may be so, but reports are that many of those people were avidly watching their well-trained and highly motivated countrymen accumulate all those gold medals, and that the entire nation is basking in the glow of China's phenomenal achievement in its own Games. There is no way to exaggerate the propaganda impact of these Games on behalf of the Communist leadership.
Yup, they're still communists, even though neither Marx nor Chairman Mao himself would understand the high-end shopping malls or the BMW dealerships. The Chinese Communist Party has made a pact with its citizens: We will allow you to be money-mad capitalists as long as you don't step out of line and threaten our rule. Oh, and by the way, our ancestors invented paper, gunpowder and printing long before Gutenberg even thought of it, and there is no civilization on earth superior to ours. We are great people and these Olympics prove it. And if anyone criticizes anything we do (Tibet, Darfur, etc.) they are just bitter, jealous enemies of the Great Chinese People.
In the end, the Chinese got everything they wanted, even sufficiently clean air. Michael Phelps? Sure, he had a good day or two, but they'll see him in London and he'd better be ready to go very fast. No reason why they can't master swimming, too.
Bob Ryan is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at ryan@globe.com. 