The modern Olympics have given the world an enormous number of stirring moments of athletic grace and courage from Paavo Nurmi to Michael Phelps. When the Olympic ideals have been pursued unsullied by the baser agendas of world domination and ethnic hatred, they can be a motivating force for world peace and understanding. At its purest, Olympic drama can send a shiver of inspiration down the spine of even the most scurrilous human.
And yet the Olympics are fully human and as such are equally a reflection of the best and the worst in all of us. As such, they aim at but never reach the ideal. And as global festival designed to bring all nations in a fractious planet together, they suffer the inevitable woes of an athletic Tower of Babel whose reach for harmony and perfection shall always exceed its grasp.
Indeed, from their inception in 776 BC, the Olympics were designed to bring nations together, to be conducted under a mutually agreed upon truce during times of war—known as hieromenia. Contenders from Sparta and Athens and the Macedonian and Roman empires came together every four years to compete. Now, 2,500 years later, their very popularity and inherent glory have made them a tempting target for terrorism.
While the Olympics are supposed to be free of politics, they have been used as surrogate battlefields to trumpet the superiority of many nations, ideologies, ethnicities. They are stages for ambitious nations to strut their stuff in search of prestige and acceptance on an unparalleled world stage.
While we look at the ancient Olympics with rose colored nostalgia, they have never been free of politics, bribery and cheating. In ancient times, while only olive wreaths were offered to the winners, athletes were mercenaries of sweat, supported and generously rewarded by their home towns. In 388 B.C. the boxer Eupolus of Thessaly bribed three opponents to take a dive. In A.D. 67, Emperor Nero bribed the judges to declare him the chariot champion, ignoring the fact that he fell and never finished. Vases and urns depict judges flogging athletes for false starts and eye gouging.
Olympic Boycott Scorecard
After the first Olympics of the modern era in 1896, there have been boycotts aplenty. The questions that always arise, taking into consideration the law of unintended consequences, are: Were they justified? Did they work?
In 1920 and 1924, Germany wasn't allowed to field teams as punishment for its role in World War 1. Seems like closing the barn door after the horse escaped. Certainly it was not a stiff enough sanction to have prevented a war. But when the transgressor is not a host nation, bans not aimed at a current policy violating human rights seem beside the point.
In 1923, the Soviet Union was banned for the Bolshevik revolution and it stayed out until 1956. Coming from the era of the Tsars, Russia wasn't a particularly sports-conscious nation until propaganda value became apparent well into the Cold War.
In 1936, many countries—but not the USA—boycotted the Berlin games due to Hitler’s racist policies. This, of any Olympic boycott, seems most on target. But many U.S. industrial leaders, conservatives and some celebrities seemed to be blinded by surface Nazi glamour. Guided by their own shamefully entrenched racist and anti-Semitic sentiments, these captains of industry contributed to a naïve willingness to join in this Nazi celebration. However, Jesse Owens’ four gold medal triumphs probably did more to shatter Hitler’s deluded beliefs in Aryan superiority. Bottom line: Worldwide participation in the Games bolstered Nazi confidence, aggression, and belief that they could propagandize and lie with impunity. Despite Owens’ wins, the Berlin Olympics emboldened Nazi ambitions for world domination and their plans to exterminate the Jews.
In 1956, Egypt, Iraq, and Lebanon boycotted due to the Suez Crisis and the Netherlands, Spain, and Switzerland boycotted the Melbourne Games due to the Soviet invasion of Hungary. It was a stretch to link Australia with the Arab Israeli conflict. But in essence, the Arab nations were futilely trying to pressure the IOC to blame Israel and kick them out of the Games. Same story with European nations, futilely trying to get the IOC to oust the Soviets. Bottom line: The “Blood in the Water” water polo match in which outraged Hungary smashed the Soviets 4-0 in a brutal confrontation was the most satisfying moral equivalent of war of any Olympic Games.
In 1964, South Africa was banished due to apartheid and in 1972 Rhodesia was similarly kicked out. The Olympic and international sports banishment, plus the economic sanctions, eventually killed apartheid and freed South Africa from its racist government. Interesting sidelight: While in prison, Nobel Prizewinner Nelson Mandela took heart from Muhammad Ali’s Olympic and professional boxing success as well as his stand against the Vietnam War.
In 1976, 26 African nations boycotted the Montreal Olympics to protest the IOC’s decision to allow New Zealand to participate in the Games despite that nation’s decision to let its (non-Olympic) rugby team play South Africa. While solidarity among African nations against any shadow of tolerance of apartheid was noble, its great endurance athletes paid dearly while having marginal to no effect on South African policy.
In 1980, the USA forced its athletes to boycott the Moscow Games to protest the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Athletes who made the team and could not go remain extraordinarily bitter at then-President Jimmy Carter to this day. They point to the fact that the boycott had no effect on the Soviet aggression, which lasted 9 years and collapsed of its own accord. Given the failure to discern Nazi motives in 1936, the Moscow boycott suggests overcompensation. Most American athletes, even those with a conscience, lean towards the original idea of the Olympics as a moment of truce in a violent world.
In 1984, the Soviet Union, the East Germans and the Cubans retaliated and stayed away from the Los Angeles Games. Given the US logic for its Moscow boycott, it’s hard to blame the Communist stalwarts for retaliation. However, on the propaganda front, their victory was pyrrhic. Under Peter Ueberroth’s direction, the LA Games were a fiscal triumph for corporate capitalism and no one in the US gave a thought that its medal haul was at all devalued without our favorite Cold War foes.
In 1988, North Korea boycotted the Seoul games when it was not allowed to co-host and Cuba and Ethiopia joined. Crazy North Korean leader Kim Jung Il could stay home and play with his Elvis outfits and nobody cared. Boxing and baseball and track nations did miss the Cubans, and long distance running nations missed the Ethiopians—but there was not a geopolitical ripple. In 2004, conciliatory diplomacy on both sides of the 37th Parallel led to a unified Korean team.
In 2000, Afghanistan was banned in protest over the then-Taliban government’s policies towards women. Bottom line: Not missed, since any women athletes would have had to wear beekeeper’s outfits or face execution by stoning when they got home. Until the post-US military invaded and took out the Taliban. The bad news—they also invaded Iraq.
Host Nation Shenanigans
Sadly, the IOC has more often than not turned its back on major human rights abuses. Conversely, it has rarely shied away from awarding the Games to unsavory host countries—and the results have often led to bloodshed.
The 1968 games were awarded to the one-party, supposedly democratic government of Mexico, which hoped to use the games to legitimize its rule. Like China now, Mexico was confronted by massive anti-government protests that drew 160,000 to the capital three months before the Games. A week before the Games, the military mowed down more than 200 students in Mexico City. While the IOC and the Mexican government kept silent about the Tlatelolco Massacre, IOC president Avery Brundage reserved his moral indignation for the silent, peaceful, black-gloved, Black Power salute on the medal stand by 200 meter gold and bronze medalists Tommie Smith and John Carlos. With the support of craven American Olympic officials, Brundage ordered them banned from the Games. While ABC Wide World of Sports commentator Howard Cosell got the point and reported Smith and Carlos respectfully in the context of the civil rights struggle in the US, then-Chicago newspaperman and future ABC sportscaster Brent Musburger wrote scolding columns against the pair that were toadying press-releases for the Brundage point of view.
Just one year after the South Korean military government killed 200 and injured 1,000 pro-democracy demonstrators in Kwangju, the IOC awarded South Korea the 1988 Games. The South Korean government lagged behind Hong Kong, Singapore and Taiwan and hoped to use the Olympics to boost its international image—and its industrial ambitions. In one of the rare positive outcomes, pressure from the international community made further repression unfeasible and the military government of South Korea relinquished power to an elected, democratic government in 1987.
The Nadir of the Olympic Dream
In 1936, Hitler and his Nazi regime hosted the Berlin Olympics. While we now know the genocidal horrors to come, many prominent Americans of the time were enthusiastic about the German flair for pomp, ceremony, organization and the eye-catching fascist aesthetic rendered stirringly in the film Olympia by Hitler’s favorite film director Leni Riefenstahl. Illustrating the degree to which some prominent Americans fell for Hitler’s insidious bluster, Charles Lindbergh, the heroic aviator pilot who was the first to fly solo across the Atlantic, and industrialist Henry Ford, a pioneer of the assembly line and the Model T, were both pre-war Nazi sympathizers who made forceful isolationist arguments to keep the US out of war with Germany. In return, Hitler was an admirer of American mass production techniques and an avid reader of the anti-Semitic tracts penned by Ford (who later renounced those opinions).
"I regard Henry Ford as my inspiration," Hitler told a Detroit News reporter two years before becoming the German chancellor in 1933. In fact, Hitler awarded Ford and Lindbergh the Grand Cross of the German Eagle medal in 1938.
Then American Amateur Athletic Union leader and future International Olympic Committee chief Avery Brundage was an enthusiastic supporter of Hitler’s Berlin Olympics. He fought hard against an American movement to boycott the Nazi showcase despite a stark preview of coming atrocities—Hitler’s National Socialist Party had already enacted the infamous Nuremberg laws which denied Jews citizenship. Brundage, widely considered an anti-Semite, said, “I have not seen or heard of anything to indicate discrimination of any race or religion” in Germany.
Side note: A crusty dinosaur of multiple retrograde prejudices, Brundage was also strongly opposed to women in track and field. “I am fed up to the ears with women as track and field competitors,” he said in 1936. “As swimmers and divers girls are as beautiful and adroit as they are ineffective and unpleasing on the track.”
But in most ominous words that forever put the lie that the privileged stuffed shirts of the IOC truly wanted to keep politics out of the Olympics, Brundage warned that “certain Jews must now understand that they cannot use these games as a weapon in their boycott of the Nazis.”
While the international community and the AAU demanded that the Nazis not ban Jewish athletes, they applied only perfunctory pressure. While Hitler promised to allow top-ranked Jewish high jumper Gretel Bergmann to compete for Germany, once they obtained U.S. agreement to come to the Games they quietly cut her from the team. Most shamefully, Brundage and craven US track officials caved to German wishes by the last-minute removal of Jewish sprinters Marty Glickman and Sam Stoller from the US 4x100 meter relay.
To be fair, some of the popular enthusiasm for the Nazis came from the fear of the Russian Communists—and the tragically mistaken notion that Hitler’s Nazis would be a faithful ally against anticipated Communist aggression. Thus, amidst the oceans of red and black flags with the swastikas marching past Albert Speer’s fascist architecture, the muscular blond men and women athletes, and the acres of Nazi military surrounding the Olympic ceremonies served as a turbocharged Nazi infomercial that swept up American industrialists and fat cats as well as the aforementioned celebrities.
While Hitler’s fantasies of Aryan superiority took root in Riefenstahl’s innovative film (which invented and created many of the camera techniques we now take for granted in NBC footage), Jesse Owens’ immortal four gold medal-winning performances were a powerful rebuke. Further undercutting Hitler’s racist disdain for Jews and blacks, German Luz Long, a blond, blue-eyed physical exemplar of Aryan good looks, took an immediate liking to Owens. A fellow long jumper, Long saw Owens was fouling during the qualification for the finals and had only one jump left. In a shining example of Olympic sportsmanship, Long advised Owens to mark a spot 18 inches from the takeoff line to assure a legal jump. It worked. Owens then got back in the groove and won gold in the final, and stayed friends with Long until the German’s death fighting in World War II.
Sadly, even Baron de Coubertin, the founder of the modern Olympics and the man who said “The most important thing in the Olympic Games is not to win but to take part, just as the most important thing in life is not the triumph but the struggle,” was mesmerized and entranced by the Nazi pre-war pep rally.
De Coubertin declared in a post Olympic interview that Berlin was “sanctifying” his Olympic ideals by “some daring innovations… such as the relay carrying the holy torch from Olympia (Greece), the magnificent celebration in the monumental stadium on the first night of the Games.”
Responding to criticism that the Olympics were turned into a Nazi billboard, de Coubertin said “The Games are perverted? The Olympic ideal is sacrificed to propaganda? That is utterly untrue. The magnificent success of the Berlin Games served perfectly the idea of the Olympics. … the fact that the Games in 1936 are illuminated by Hitler strength and discipline … we should wish that the games would always be so well organized.”
Ironically, German embarrassment and guilt over their Nazi past led to the greatest tragedy in the Olympics themselves.
Fearful of reminding the world of its militaristic past, organizers of the 1972 Munich Olympics decided to keep soldiers and gun s away from the public and kept security invisible and light, counting on the idealistic athletes to celebrate two weeks of peace and love in Hitler’s old haunts. Sadly, Black September Palestinian terrorists posing as Olympic athletes broke into the Israeli team’s compound at 31 Connollystrasse, held 12 team members hostage for the return of Palestinian fedayeen, and eventually killed all of their hostages during a botched rescue shootout at Fürstundfeldbruck Air Base.
In a modern world with all its dangers, Munich was a lasting reminder that not everything about an authoritarian society is bad (security) and not everything about an open, trusting society (vulnerability) comes without a price. It reminds us that nations and people are complex. That advances in human connection and understanding require both vigilance and openness. And that when something as valuable as the Olympic meeting of the flower of athletic perfection of all the nations would be a precious commodity that would never again go undefended to the hilt.
Not well known warning signs that vigilance would forever after be necessary: During the 1984 Los Angeles Games, the radical Weather Underground group planned an attack with a large quantity of plastic explosives, said Bill Rathburn, a former police chief and consultant to the State Department. Terrorists tried to attack the 1988 Summer Games in Seoul twice and were foiled in an attempt at the 1998 Winter Olympics in Japan. In 1996 at Atlanta, Eric Rudolph planted a bomb that killed one spectator and injured 100 others.
Security successes never get a medal. But the world should thank Greek and U.S. security forces for the nail biting capture just months before the Games of members of the November 17 Greek terrorist cell that planned an Olympic bombing.
China Today: A roaring Sino-Shrek, or an Insecure Sally Field?
So much seemed to be riding on these Olympics for the host Chinese, who want to prove they are more than worthy of hosting the Games.
So why should ordinary folk like us, who just want to see Michael Phelps kicking ass and taking names in the Water Cube and the Redeem Team do the same in basketball, give a damn about ideological saber rattling and geopolitical chest bumping? And if you are one of triathlon’s fans, maybe you only care to see if American triathletes can break into the medals against Vanessa and Emma and Javier and Bevan.
Think back to Berlin 1936, when too many ignored human rights issues in favor of Hitler’s pomp. Staying awake and paying attention to what seems true and false in the show that China presents to the world should give us a clue to the way the World is going and what our nation ought to do about it.
While China and the U.S. will compete to lead the sporting medal counts, it is naïve to think that the Olympics are any less a competition for international approval and prestige. George Orwell described such global sporting festivals as “war minus the shooting.” Coming out of a century of embarrassment and isolation, China’s national psyche is almost like a weird combination of the powerful Shrek and the insecure Sally Field. They want to come out of the Games and be able to say “They love me! They really love me!”
Their leaders say as much. “Winning the host rights means winning the respect, trust and favor of the international community,” said Wang Wei, a senior Beijing Olympic official. The official Chinese news agency Xinhua noted that the selection of Beijing was “another milestone in China’s rising international status and a historical even in the great renaissance of the Chinese nation.”
More than this, Chinese leaders see the Olympics as a chance to display the country’s rapid economic growth, and modernization, and show that China is a major power on equal footing with the West. Which is why essays in a South African newspaper that noted that China, following Mexico in 1968, was just the second “developing nation” to host an Olympics makes the Chinese tear out their hair.
Some people say that by accepting the Chinese as an Olympic host, the greedy corporate leaders have forgiven the massacres in Tibet, the funding of slaughter of Darfur, the rapid pollution of the planet, the silencing of dissent in exchange for access to the huge Chinese market. And in some real way, they equate this silence with good manners, equating abandonment of freedom of speech with adhering to the ancient ideal of the Olympic truce. The athletes who have adopted the Michael Jordan humanitarian stance—say nothing that could short circuit a global endorsement—are so far afraid to even make a gesture or say a word reminding the 10,000 media of the plight of Darfur, of Tibet, of the millions of Chinese rousted out of their homes to make way for Olympic construction. So far, there are no Tommie Smiths, no descendants of John Carlos.
Yet, even though these failings are self evident, nothing is simply black and white.
While some may think that being open minded to the Chinese Olympics is an invitation to the Stockholm Syndrome, they cite Neville Chamberlain’s catastrophic appeasement of the Germans at Munich. But if you look at the courage of Egypt’s Anwar Sadat making peace with Israel, Nelson Mandela’s accord with the old lions of apartheid in search of the only possible peace in his newly free country, you might see a way into a better future. But better to look at the present. See the Dalai Lama, the spiritual leader of occupied Tibet, called “a devil with a human face but the heart of a beast,” and a “wolf in monk’s clothes” by Chinese officials. Risking rebellion from his own Tibetan people and astonished mistrusting disbelief by the Chinese, the Dalai Lama recently offered to accept Chinese rule in return for religious freedom and less military oppression.
Is the Dalai Lama a traitor to his people, or a courageous visionary for peace?
Perhaps in that spirit, it’s worth it to look at the best and worst of China’s Olympics with clear eyes and an open heart.
Surely, let’s remember the Chinese have come a long way in 100 years.
For the first half of the 20th century, this nation of 1.3 billion was a whipping boy for the aggressive Japanese World War II aggression; then a reluctant, insecure entrant into the modern world even after the 1949 Communist takeover, the acquisition of nuclear bombs, and standoffs with the mighty US as a big brother superpower in the Korean and Vietnam conflicts.
After a self-destructive orgy of Mao’s violent paranoid leadership—several million deaths from rural purges, one million deaths in urban purges, 20-43 million deaths from catastrophic agricultural policies in the Great Leap Forward, 20 million dead in labor camps, 2 to 7 million deaths in the Cultural Revolution in which youth were encouraged to rat on parents and dour Marxists sent artists to reeducation camps to stamp out bourgeoisie free expression—China has made huge strides.
Starting with the pragmatism of Mao’s successor, Deng Xiaoping, China charted a careful course toward abandoning old Cold War aggression and seeking global normalization. Observing the implosion of the old Soviet empire in 1989, the Chinese government was horrified to find a student revolution demanding freedoms in its own back yard that same year and reverted to a violent Maoist response.
After smashing the student movement with tanks in the Tiananmen Square massacre, the Chinese government wiped off the blood from its hands and ordered its best minds to study that Soviet catastrophe and find a way for the ruling Communist Party to adapt without losing control. The result was a new hybrid where the Communist ruling party would ride the Capitalist Tiger of free trade and carefully modulated entrepreneurial and cultural freedoms.
Hard to imagine after decades of totalitarian Maoist conformity, downtown Beijing now has pulsing neon to rival Times Square, and luxury stores featuring as many Rolex, Hermes, Louis Vuitton, Tiffany, Sony, Samsung, Nike and Adidas stores you could find in London or Paris. With the approach of the Olympics, the Chinese systematically bulldozed many of its quaint hutong alleyway communities to make way for spectacular Olympic venues.
They sought out the greatest international architects to create daring monuments, signaling a dramatic break with the golden roofs and red walls of the ancient Forbidden City, and the massive, stolid Stalinist government edifices like the Great Hall all that defined Beijing as a xenophobic fortress, mired in its authoritarian past.
The new jewels are: The Bird’s Nest stadium, which arose from a collaboration between Chinese artist Ai Weiwei and the Swiss architectural firm Herzog and deMeuron; The Water Cube, the National Swimming Center designed by Australia’s PTW Architects; the CCTV tower, a vast glass and steel donut designed by Dutch architect Rem Koolhaus; Beijing Airport’s Terminal Three, designed by Britain’s Norman Foster; and the National Center for the Performing Arts, designed by France’s Paul Andreu, covered in titanium and intertwined with fountains and water.
With entrepreneurship encouraged, the Chinese hybrid ideology leaves the economy booming but the air quality like the film about a dystopian Asian future—Black Rain.
The downside of the riding the Tiger of Growth is that it leaves a huge carbon footprint. Today’s Beijing is in the process of replacing 10 million bicycles with 3 million carbon-belching cars. China now has 100 cities of more than 1 million people, and 12 of them are among the world’s 20 biggest polluters. A combination of sand from the Gobi desert and pollutants from northeast China’s industrial smokestacks is regularly measured in Kansas. The growth which has created many millionaires still leaves the 1.3 billion population with an average household income of roughly $2,000 a year (way up from a decade ago). Thus the accelerating craving for cars and CDs remains dependent largely on 1950s energy—polluting coal power, bad cars which gulp crude gas, and spilling chemical waste into legendary rivers at an alarming pace.
The upside of the Olympics is that China now realizes that the whole planet needs to focus on green solutions. Even if it’s just a PR ploy that led to 30 million flowerpots and thousands of new trees, it’s building good habits. Perhaps more important, China’s desperate need to produce an Olympics that is not choked by coal dust and sulfate has awakened the leadership to the reality that something must be done about it or its roaring economic progress will grind to a halt. In the best of all outcomes, they will quickly learn the lessons of the West. Back in 1950, both Los Angeles and London lived in a choking charcoal world. Modern pollution controls made those cities livable and here’s hoping China sees the urgency.
Still, when home country crowds cheer for their Chinese heroes at the Bird’s Nest, ecological irony abounds. They shout “Zhongguo jiayou!” Which literally means “Add oil, China!”
China’s National Olympic Scorecard
While the big questions will only be fully answered by the end of the 21st century, we can judge the Chinese by their Olympics, human moment by human moment.
Bad: After American cyclists arrived at the Beijing airport wearing masks to guard against pollution, those riders read a statement of apology to the media. Here’s our best guess: Chinese officials pressured compliant USOC officials to craft an apology for the riders to read to the media, in a manner reminiscent of prisoners of war forced to confess their war crimes.
Good: Chinese crowds at the event venues have been generous and warm toward all, even rival competitors. No booing and throwing trash the way Chinese soccer fans might’ve emulated their naughty Euro counterparts. Maybe they’d been warned, but the effect was all good.
Bad: Paranoid Chinese security officials reneged on their promise to allow free access to Chinese society and to Internet sites openly critical of the government.
Good: Beijing officials successfully educated Beijingers in Western manners: No spitting on public streets, no body blocks on fellow commuters to get into subways and buses, teaching taxi drivers rudimentary English, German, French and Spanish.
Bad: Chinese security detaining a London journalist for reporting on a Tibetan protest. If any Western journalist or photographer has ambitions of getting a Pulitzer for recording a Falun Gong protester immolating him or herself in Tiananmen Square, forget about it.
Good, no, Great!: The artistry of the Opening Ceremony orchestrated by renowned Chinese film director Zhang Yimou. The best unintended consequence of Stephen Spielberg’s act of conscience in resigning his place on the creative team for the Opening Ceremony was the lack of schmaltz in this masterpiece. While some critics pointed out the precision and synchronicity of the thousands of tai chi masters and dancers seemed robotic and reminded them of computer generated graphics—they missed the point! Every movement was made by thousands of humans working perfectly together. As inventors of gunpowder, the fireworks were breathtakingly fantastic.
Bad: Fussy party leaders pulling a Milli Vanilli—using the beautiful voice of the girl with imperfect teeth and leaving the cutie out front and lip synching.
Good: Sometimes it is better to be lucky than good. Heavy rains by the end of the first week kept road cycling and time trials cool and lungs clear. The rains promised to wash out the deadly particulates and coal dust away from the early track and field events and the women’s marathon. Or maybe it wasn't just lucky. Maybe Chinese plans to seed rain clouds by shooting silver iodide worked.
Sad—but not organizers’ fault: To have one homicidal nut in a city of 17.4 million knife an American tourist and critically injure his wife is an awful modern urban reality—but not really a blot on overall Chinese security.
Good: Approaching their own Olympics, Chinese authorities realized doping to win, much like pollution, would ruin their international image - and thus be bad for business. Instead of doping, they invested millions in local, regional and national schools for young athletes and groomed the best into the newest Big Red Medal machine. Athletes caught doping were banned for life and lost any lifetime sinecure they might have warned with a medal. Even a poor Chinese female triathlete was caught and banned in 2007.
Bad: Early Olympics air quality. Three times worse than World Health Organization safe levels. Even worse, Orwellian Olympic organizers claiming these were “blue sky days.”
Good: Chinese athletes are not robots! We already know and love Houston Rockets center Yao Ming, who is the thoughtful, sportsmanlike and kind face of Chinese basketball superstardom. But not all Chinese sports stars are boring! Diver Guo Jingjing is gorgeous, makes a ton in endorsements for more products than Michael Jordan and she has a well deserved rep for diva behavior that makes Madonna seem like a well behaved Catholic schoolgirl. To top it all off, 110-meter high hurdler Liu Xiang, who won gold in Athens and thus was the first Chinese to earn Olympic gold in track and field, is so popular in China he outpaces Yao Ming in popularity and income, with $23 million in 2007 endorsements. While he is no hot dog – “I would prefer not to be famous," said Liu "In my heart, I would like to feel ordinary, and it is hard to feel like this”—his 2004 Olympic gold medal was China's first in a men's track-and-field event in the modern Games—which made him an instant symbol for China's ability to conquer the world in new fields. Finally, his legs are insured for $13.3 million.
