A fitting farewell to Beijing

IT was the taxi ride to end them all.

One that encapsulated what being in Beijing at Olympics time is all about. And a fitting tale on which to bid farewell from China.

There we were, two colleagues from rival newspapers, out in the Hou Hai district of town for a quiet meal by a lake - that was until fireworks exploded in the skies above us for half-an-hour to celebrate the closure of an event that has been six years in the planning.

Hailing a taxi to return to Olympic Green and buses to our respective media villages was a feat of extra-sensory perception in itself. With hundreds of locals and tourists spilling out onto the street in a post-fireworks haze, the trick was to spot the one cab in the line of traffic which might suddenly become vacant.

Eventually we managed it, jumping in before we had established that the driver would be able to read either a destination card (in Chinese, naturally) or a map - far from a given in Beijing.

No matter. We were in and we weren't getting out. We would make him understand somehow. Er, not exactly. Much waving of arms, pointing at pieces of paper, talking in different, mutually incomprehensible, languages and 200 yards later, he pulled over to the pavement.

It was then that we were saved by a passing American chap, who leaned through the open passenger side window, asked where we were headed and prmoptly told the driver in what - as far as we were concerned - was perfect Mandarin to take us to the Olympics media centre.

A surreal moment in itself, but the real adventure was only just beginning.

A maze of streets later, we suddenly spotted a roadsign towards the MPC - the Media Press Centre - straight ahead. Hurrah, we're on the right road. Er, oh no we're not. Now he's turning off and going onto a busy dual carriageway.

Could that be 3rd Ring Road, I wondered, having collected 4th Ring Road, 5th Ring Road and 6th Ring Road as badges of Beijing traffic honour over the past fortnight.

This can't be right. Now he's coming back off it and we're back on the road we were on a minute ago, only going in the opposite direction.

A few seconds later and our man, taxi driver 187698, pulled up outside the Beijing International Media Centre. Ooops, wrong media centre. Cue more waving of arms and talking in different, mutually incomprehensible, languages.

Down a side street, a swinging U-turn, back to the main road and we were sitting pretty once more.

Until we hit a huge square - no, not Tian'anmen - and hundreds of soldiers marched across our line. Sorry, make that thousands. And we needed to go straight on. Like that was going to happen.

Okay, thought taxi driver 187698, I'll go left, then. Which he did. Only by now, we were suddenly sandwiched between dozens of giant troop carriers on our left and several battalions of the Chinese Army on our right.

Our man valiantly fought his way between the troop carriers so that now we were sandwiched front and back by the vehicles and were still marching to the tune of the soldiers on our right.

It was than that we realised the complete catastrophe in which we had lumbered ourselves. To our left was a pavement with bus stops and flower pots and metal railings. Beyond it was the dual carriageway - definitely not 3rd Ring Road - that we were supposed to be on and along which traffic was fairly flying along.

We weren't. The troop carriers, with their hazard warning lights flashing, had all but ground to a halt. Troops and troops and troops were still passing our open windows and poor old taxi driver 187698 was fretting.

He could see his livelihood disappearing into the distance for this. Impromptu enlisting in the army was not usually carried out like this. A tactical manoeuvre having been planned with military precision had suddenly been thrown into chaos by two English journalists and a Beijing cabbie.

An officer suddenly caught sight of us. His tone wasn't unpleasant but neither was he saying: "Have a good evening, gentlemen."

As he began questioning our hapless driver, so the soldiers stopped marching and began climbing into the backs of the carrier. At the same time, more Army trucks, all with a machine of some description covered by an awning on the back, began to roll along on the inside lane of the dual carriageway. We were totally surrounded now.

We waved our official media badges in the face of the officer who, if not placated, appeared to realise that the spanner in his works had no sinister undercurrent.

Finally, with the troops safely in their carriers, we were able to swing around them and drive along the roadway upon which they had been marching. Our man, who had long since passed the fretting stage and moved on to apoplexy, suddenly let out a huge guffaw of relief.

He still had to negotiate the finer points of the Beijing road grid, by now filling up with spectators leaving the Closing Ceremony, but at least he still had his freedom and his job.

He deserved a big tip. We gave him one, especially as he had honourably turned off his meter upon arriving at the wrong media centre and not re-started it.

Instead of the 23yuan - almost two quid - he was owed, we gave him 60 - a fiver. It was the least we could do to the bravest taxi in the land.

Driver 187698, you are our hero.

Friday night, Saturday morning

USAIN has shot his bolt, the relay girls have gone to practise their baton changing for the next major championship and even the Australian pole vaulter, Steve Hooker, can't find anyone else left to high-five.

It is 1.15 in the morning and I have finished writing. Story filed, time to leave the Bird's Nest.

The public address system is still belting out tunes at full blast. I take a look at what's going on. There must be a couple of hundred people in the arena, either on the track or the infield.

Some are changing the configuration of the infield for tomorrow night's athletics finale, others seem to be stretching in tune to the music. They don't look like athletes. Perhaps they're plain-clothes dancers preparing for the closing ceremony. If so, the scale is going to be minute compared to the jamboree which opened the Games a fortnight ago.

A fortnight already? Where did it go? In my case, in a blur of bike wheels, canoe paddles, tumble turns and penhold grips.

Scene surveyed, I head for the exit. A security guard is so busy contemplating the world according to his kneecap that he doesn't even flinch as I walk past. Signs of life are fleeting. The stunning light show, the rainbows that climb to the top of the giant overhanging lampposts and then fall again in an electronic loop that lasts from nightfall to daybreak, is the only radical movement catching my eye.

I walk across the broken paving slabs separated by gravel. My sandals are cutting into my feet after a day of hiking from shuttle bus to venue, from media centre to mixed zone - a day which has taken in Tim Brabants winning gold in his kayak, the modern pentathlon showjumping phase and the evening's athletics in the stadium. Even Gordon Brown, who was spotted chatting to Heather Fells and Katy Livingston during the pentathlon, probably did not get swished around as many events today.

A hectic day, but no less normal for that. An Olympic day.

I take off my sandals, pick them up and carry them. It is going to be a long walk - maybe 20 minutes - and I want to keep the developing blisters at the sore stage.

I make a check call to the office. All clear. Everything gathered in. There won't be a big hole in the paper tomorrow morning where my report should have been. Fine, call me if there any problems.

I phone my wife. Three weeks away from her and our six-month-old girl seem an eternity. We talk and suddenly my trek to the Olympic Green bus station doesn't seem so arduous. The phone call cannot last forever, though, and I'm back plodding along.

A volunteer in a golf buggy scoots past. I wave at him in the hope of hitching a lift along the straightest avenue on Olympic Green. Don't know where he's going, don't care.

He's headed in the right direction, that's all that matters. He laughs at me, pointing behind his seat at the back of his golf cart and into the giant tray which obviously contains something that I don't want to sit in.

'What about the seat next to you?' I shout out expectantly. Too late. He's off. In what seems like a matter of seconds, he's level with where I want to me. I'll be another five minutes at my pace.

No worries. It's still balmy and the concrete is offering a soothing coolness to my aching feet. And there's always something new to attract your attention around here. In this case, it's a sign pointing ahead and advertising the presence of something called 'Beijing 2008 Superstore.'

Intriguing. I'll have to have a wander in there. During opening hours, naturally. Only a guess, but I don't suppose they extend to 1.30 in the morning. They don't.

I catch sight of two Chinese girls walking ahead of me at not even half my pace. Wherever they are going - and I can't imagine their destination in this desolate early morning landscape - they are going to be a while getting there.

To my left, far to my left, I spy the bus station. Fortunately at this time of night, the buses leave as soon as they fill up.

The volume of media personnel still working long after the athletes have left and joined the parties in their village or tucked themselves up for another, a final, day of competition, is quite mind-boggling.
There's still a no-man's land in front of the IBC - the International Broadcast Centre - to negotiate, but thankfully the sentry guarding the area realises it's late and lets me pass.

On the bus, I sit behind four Aussies, all with beer in hand, no doubt celebrating success in the pole vault. I think about offering a not-so-gentle dig, something along the lines of: "You must nearly have forgotten what it was like to win a gold medal eh, lads?" but decide against it.

They have become too easy a target. There's no fun in it any more.

My last task of the day is to write this blog.

I've finished now.

Good ni  , sorry, morning.

Nice weather for (Beijing) ducks

CAN'T make up its mind here.

In the course of a fortnight, we've had smog, fierce humidity, blazing sunshine, mist and bucketloads of rain. And when you go inside, the chill of air conditioning. It's enough to make you feel ill just thinking about all of the temperature changes.

Today, the heavens opened again. Just walking from the apartment block in the Media Village to the shuttle bus that ferries us to the front gate was an adventure. When it rains in Beijing, the sheer volume is staggering. Paths and roads are turned instantly into lakes. It's not so much a case of miss the puddle as spot a place to put your feet without the water lapping over the top of your shoes.

And if it's bad for us, pity the athletes whose training regimes have been set out in detail to replicate exactly conditions in which to realise their Olympic ambitions.

The track cyclists were alright. Barring a leaky roof it was always going to be dry in the Laoshan Velodrome. The women's road racers, on the other hand, had their best-laid plans thrown into disarray.
Marianne Vos of Holland set up camp in El Salvador because the stultifying heat and humidity in the Central American country best resembled that of Beijing, only to find she was cycling for an Olympic medal in a thunderstorm.

The beach volleyball girls must have thought they had regressed to childhood with water mixing with sand and threatening to knock their castle down before they were ready. It's usually the players' costumes which turn the eye. Yesterday it was a sea of multi-coloured pac-a-macs stealing the limelight.

Down at the Bird's Nest Stadium, the decathletes got soaked in their 100m heats, dried off and got soaked again when the officials decided thy couldn't delay the long jump portion of the competition any long.

Over on the javelin runway, the slippiness under foot meant that the only sure way of stopping once you have launched the missile skywards was to throw yourself to the ground. Down they went, one by one.

It made you think that they should had alternative Olympic sports on standby for such days. Chinese 'It's A Knockout' would have been a hoot, especially as every game would no doubt have involved collecting water - plenty of it about - in some shape of receptacle which Arthur Ellis could measure with his dipstick.

The women's walkers actually enjoyed the conditions. Assuming they were telling the truth, the men's marathon runners might be wishing for similarly leaden skies on Sunday morning. Rain cuts through pollution.

Of course, the athletes who didn't mind a jot were the open water swimmers who were wet anyway. What was an extra drop of water on the head for David Davies on his heroic swim when his whole body was immersed in the stuff in the first place?

Hong Kong has had its own issues, of course. A typhoon warning when we flew in there on the way to Beijing and another on its way this weekend just we pass through there again. And too much rain for the equestrian events that have appeared as an afterthought on this Olympic programme.

Have the Games been better for the violently changing weather? On the whole, yes. The pollution that threatened to sap energy and cut down on lung capacity has largely been kept at bay.

Those who have been caught in the downpours and emerged triumphant, like Nicole Cooke in the women's cycling road race, will tell you they wouldn't have had it any other way.

Lies, Damned Lies and Statistics

THERE are some funny people about.

Forget the sports scientists, the psychologists, the massage physiotherapists and even the plain old coaches. They haven't got a clue when it comes to producing Olympic champions.

It's all in the stars, you see. Well, according to some awfully clever chap called Kenneth Mitchell and his study 'The Pisces Effect' we could have predicted that Rebecca Adlington (below) would win two golds in the swimming pool. She's an Aquarius after all, a water sign, so that was bound to work.

Apparently, Scorpions because of their tail and its sting, I presume, are especially good at sabre fencing with two of the three men's individual medallists in Beijing belonging to that sign.

Then there are Taureans, whose ability to pole vault is unparalled. Funny that. I can just see a great snorting bull running down an athletics runway and flinging himself over a high bar before landing on a soft, spongy bed.

In the interests of fairness, Kate Dennison and Steve Lewis - British competitors in the pole vault these Games - were both born under Taurus. What about Yelena Isibayeva, I thought? Guess what, she is a ... Gemini and Sergey Bubka, the greatest male pole vaulter of all time, is Sagittarius.

No matter. We press on.

I know, let's have a look at all of Britain's jangling cycling team and their medals of many colours - mostly gold. Only fair to start with man-of-the-moment Chris Hoy, an Aries. So, too, is the man he beat to win the Men's Sprint, Jason Kenny. They share March 23 as a birthday, would you believe, so if your child prodigy on wheels wasn't born on March 23, look elsewhere than a velodrome for their sporting fulfillment.

Bradley Wiggins is another Taurean, Nicole Cooke another Arian and Rebecca Romero another Aquarian. A fish out of water, you could say, having swapped a rowing boat for a bike saddle.

It's beginning to feel a big higgledy-piggledy, isn't it? For every athlete who conforms to Mr Mitchell's findings, there are three more who don't. We need a tiebreaker.

Who else, but Michael Phelps? Eight gold medals in the swimming pool. If he's a water sign, astrology wins. If not, we have to go on searching for the magic formula. Here goes: Google Michael Phelps (left) and you have his birthdate as June 30, 1985. That makes him Cancer, a crab, a water sign. Spooky. Mind you, his Chinese star sign is an Ox and you can take them to water, but you can't make them ... swim.

Enough of this frivolity. On to another askance way of looking at things and a curious website that calculates the medals table from the bottom up. That is, medals are awarded for last-place finishes in a particular event. The website is known as DFL - the D and the L stand for Dead and Last. I'll leave you to work out the rest.

Currently, the pace is being set by Canada with seven last-place finishes, while Germany and South Korea lie just one behind. Britain, as far as it is possible to make out, have stalled on four since our two synchronised diving teams, including the discordant Tom Daley and Blake Aldridge, brought up the field in their finals.

Thankfully, it is the other medal table that really counts, even if the Canadians might not agree.

Oi! I'm still working here

Talk about demob happy.

There we were, tapping away into our laptops with the cyclists having departed the Laoshan Velodrome for one final time and Britain's cycling team having scarpered with seven of the ten golds on offer when they started knocking the place down.

Well, maybe not the brickwork, although it sounded as if that might be the case. Certainly the furniture and fittings. The television monitors went first. That was fine because the cycling had all ended and there was nothing left to watch as on the sets in the media tribunes, it's not possible to switch channels and see what's going on in the Bird's Nest Stadium, for example, or the weightlifting hall.

No messing with the elastic straps holding the televisions in place. Out came a pair of scissors and off they went. Presumably they were all accounted for, although what will become of them - there were around 80 or so in the media seating in the Velodrome alone - who knows?

Multiply that by 38 different venues in total for the 28 different sports and it comes to more than 3,000 sets. If they were all on hire from China's equivalent of Radio Rentals, that's one huge bill and an even bigger warehouse.

After the tellys, the volunteers started with the phone lines and connection leads, pulling them through the ready-made holes in the desks. If not quite making a din, it was at least an accompaniment to writing that was not wholly desirable.

At least it distracted you from the general jolliness down on the floor of the Velodrome where every volunteer, it seemed, was taking his or her turn to stand on the medal podium and pose for a photo.

Naturally, they all went for the top step on which Chris Hoy and Vicky Pendleton had climbed two hours earlier. Do you think anyone has ever stood on the podium and deliberately gone for the bronze step? No, didn't think so. Must do it the next time I get close to one.

Anyway, back in the media seating - by now almost deserted because most of the other journalists had either taken the shuttle bus back to the main press centre on Olympic Green or were working in the media room downstairs in the Velodrome (where the televisions were showing Christine Ohuruogu striding to gold).

I had a quick check to make sure the desk I was working on was bolted to the floor, just in case that was their next target. It was - bolted to the floor, that is. No, they seemed to have their eyes on the power cables, but I had almost finished one report and I wasn't leaving before I did.

From scurrying removal men and women, the volunteers now resembled a chatter (not the correct collective noun, but it fits the noise) of circling vultures. I finished and filed.

There was nothing left for it but walk around the upper level of the Laoshan Velodrome which had been so good to Britain for one last time. As I reached the exit door on the far side, the one leading down to the media room, the shuttle bus and, naturally 5th Ring Road, the lights suddenly went out and the arena was plunged into total darkness.

Okay, okay, I can take a hint.

I left, almost certainly never to return, but what memories the place will hold for all of us who were there.

It's fuel for Britain isn't it?

YOU would think that if any country in the world knew how to make a steaming hot portion of Pot Noodles, it would be China. That's what I thought, anyhow, until earlier this evening at the Laoshan Velodrome.

Starved of British success we may not be, thanks to Bradley Wiggins, Chris Hoy and the boys and girls, but the food available at the track cycling venue offers up a curious mix of culinary delights for the hungry.

The choice in the Media Lounge is as follows: sandwiches (just your basic two slices of bread and a filling), mini cold hot dogs (I know, Trades Descriptions Act and all that) with nowhere to heat them up and Pot Noodles - normal and spicy varieties.

Having sampled the cold hot dogs on Saturday, I decided I could live without a repeat dose. Why not have a Pot Noodle, I thought, and a spicy one at that.

One of the Chinese volunteers cheerfully told me that she would add the water and that in five minutes a hot supper would be mine.

It was hot alright, but more soup than supper. The noodles were lost in the broth, so much boiling water had she poured in. And what did I have to eat them with? A plastic fork. Hmm.

'It's too runny,' by way of protest. The Chinese girl didn't understand. 'I'll have another one,' I said. At that, she looked puzzled as I pulled a wad of crumpled notes from my pocket. She went to take the offending pot away, until I stopped her.

Verbal communication wouldn't work, so I simply took my new pot, went to the hot water, put a tiny amount in to soften the noodles enough to lift them out and add them to my soup. This time - after another five minutes naturally - they were perfect.

Only it was while I was performing my Jamie Oliver trick that the girl demonstrated a hitherto unsuspected breadth to her English vocabulary.

'You crazy,' she said. Well, yes, it has been said before. But not as crazy as giving someone a plastic fork with which to eat soup.

There are more wholesome offerings on the spectator concourse, but the media cannot acess it. A maze of walkways and corridors mean we walk around the whole of the venue without actually coming into contact with the spectators. It is the same at the swimming, the table tennis, badminton, fencing and judo, in my experience.

The gymnastics, at the National Indoor Stadium, is different, although I couldn't find any food stalls at all there when I went to watch Daniel Keatings (below) compete in the men's individual all-around competition.

One of the other offerings in media lounges - aside from tiny mouth-sized sweet biscuits - has been a tray of apples with the helpful label of 'Seasonal fruit' stuck before it. And there was I thinking they would give us some that had been picked in December.

Naturally, no Press Centre would be complete without a McDonalds to offer an alternative to the Grill, the Asian bar and the Mediterranean counter.

Talking of which, it's nearly three o'clock in the morning and I'm sure I heard a Big Mac calling my name. Wonder if they have plastic forks down there?

I'm British don't you know, what, what, what

HOW cool has it been to be British in Beijing this weekend?

Basking in the reflective sheen of the medals that have bounced off every wall of every Olympic venue. Well, okay, not every venue and certainly not every wall. It just seems that way.

They've certainly been bouncing off the Velodrome walls. Ha, that'll teach the Chinese for getting off their bicycles and buying cars. There's another sport they could have won if they hadn't started taking the four-wheeled route to work. All they got was pollution and smog instead.

Down Laoshan way - that's where the spaceship of a Velodrome is - third has become the new first. First behind the Brits, such as Rebecca Romero (below). The Ukrainian girl who got bronze certainly celebrated as though she'd won gold in the 3000m Women's Individual Pursuit. But if there's only one medal up for grabs, then why not scream and wave your arms around like a mad woman when you win it.

While we're talking about the cycling, I know you've all been dying to hear how our favourite Chilean rider Marco Arreagada - you know, the one-man Chilean track cycling team - got on in the Men's Point Race on Saturday.

Wait for it ... cue drumroll ... he came 19th out of 20 finishers with ONE point. And that had ME screaming and waving my arms around like a mad woman. Well, someone had to cheer for him, didn't they?

No doubt Marco and his bike are currently winging their way back to their homeland on the reverse 24-hour journey that brought them to China, namely Beijing to Shanghai, Shanghai to Sydney, Sydney to Auckland and, finally, Auckland to Santiago. And all that for ONE point. Hasta la Vista, Marco. See you in London.

Which brings me back to the subject of Britain. It has been a weekend for going up to complete strangers and flashing your English accent. Holding your accreditation badge under their noses might have worked, too, but when people see my name, the last country they think I'm from is England.

From Croats to Americans, Danes to Aussies, I've accepted all of their congratulations on behalf of the athletes. There are just too many of them - the athletes, that is - to pass the congratulations on personally, so I suppose I'll have to keep them all for myself.

It must have been the same at the sailing in Qing Dao and at the rowing lake in Shunyi. And, not forgetting the National Indoor Stadium where a British gymnast stood next to a Chinese gymnast on the podium. Take a bow, Louis Smith.

To be in the Water Cube when Becky Adlington slaughtered the opposition and obliterated a world record set two decades ago was a special moment. You won't be finding my ticket for that session - the one in which Michael Phelps equalled Mark Spitz's seven golds - appearing on Ebay. No, Siree.

Now, let's see, what else we can win this week? Taekwondo? Modern Pentathlon? Triathlon? We must have a chance. Hey, the way we're going at the moment, we ought to join the Table Tennis competition as a late entry and teach the Chinese a thing or two. Oh, hang on, they're a bit good at that...

The reflected glory will only last as long as the medals keep coming ,of course. With the rowing over, our best sailors having already won and the cycling ending on Tuesday, the clunk, clunk, clunk of medal is bound to slow up somewhat.

But how much fun has it been this weekend?

Smog? What smog?

BEIJING wore a smile yesterday. The people, the buildings, the scenery. All of it bathed in sunlight so bright that it seemed as if China's marketing men had gone into overdrive and put individual days up for sponsorship, with today's being taken up by RayBan.

Presumably, yesterday was sponsored by China's Kaguls-R-Us. But, lo, the rain that turned my trainers into mush and drenched my sweatshirt so completely that I was forced to hand it in to the laundry people in our apartment block simply to be dried, actually served a purpose.

Rain dissipates smog, it seems. A Chinese science lesson - as if a kaleidoscope of sporting colour wasn't enough to awaken my senses.

Suddenly there is a depth to my vision of Beijing. There are hills all around whose existence I was completely ignorant of until up they popped this morning, casting a backdrop on the tenement blocks that I suspected, but now know, stretch for miles and miles.

Joy unbounded at the beauty of it all. Blue sky above. Judging by their gawping expressions, I'm not sure the Beijingites have seen it before. A bit like snow in Nairobi.

And, then, anger and frustration. Why couldn't it have been like this last Sunday up at the Great Wall of China when the women's road race was on? What a vista we would have had, then. Instead, even from 50 yards away, the Wall was little more than a rumour that day.

Ah, but, didn't the circumstances, the deluge, the mist, the slippery road surface, the hazardous road surface, didn't they all combine to wrap Nicole Cooke's ride in the rain for Gold into a package of memories that will forever?

Her victory was defined by the atrocious weather and will always be enhanced beyond the norm by the extraordinary circumstances - and we should all be grateful for that.

That said, I don't know anyone who wasn't grateful for blue skies yesterday, the sunshine and an air clarity and quality that we hadn't thought was possible in Beijing.

Out at Shunyi, the rowers and canoeists would have been tempted to cast their glances around them just to capture the scene of their Olympic adventure to store in their minds. Actually, Zac Purchase and and Mark Hunter won their double sculls semi-final so comfortably, they could have stopped mid-race and taken a few souvenir snaps to show the grandchildren in the years to come.

The Bird's Nest beamed with pride as the sun washed over it. The rays even found their way through the V-shaped slits in the upper seating and onto Centre Court at the Olympic Green Tennis Centre.

The hockey players, the archers, the beach volleyball players, all of them basked in a light which improved their vision. Even suncream became a factor, for goodness sake.

No body of people seemed more uplifted by the sunshine than the people who so rarely see it, the Beijingites themselves.

Their expressions were transformed. Their customary happiness gave way to unfettered joy. And you felt that the deepest of their emotions was pride. Pride that they could finally show off their city - the Temple of Heaven, the Forbidden City, Tian'anmen Square, the parks and the avenues and, of course, their brand spanking new and, today, gleaming Olympic venues.

If the sunshine was for anyone, it was surely for them.

Let's get this party started

FRIDAY night is party night in Beijing. And Saturday and Sunday nights. Oh, and next Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, too, topped off by next weekend.

Well, in one tiny enclave of Beijing, it is - the athletes' village. By the middle weekend of competition, almost half of the athletes have already completed their events.

For those for whom the Olympics means more than just another stop on their schedule - yes, tennis players, I mean you as you jet straight out of China and over to New York for the US Open - four years of hard work and sacrifice are now over and it is time to play.

Traditionally, it is when the swimming events end that the party season begins in earnest. And, naturally, the Australians, who are busy putting together their barbecues, are chief organisers of the festivities.

Wasn't it Jonathan Edwards who once famously complained that it was hard for the track and field athletes to sleep in the final week because of the din being kicked up by the demob-happy swimmers?

It was a lot quieter in the village this morning. I was afforded the privilege of touring the inner sanctum of the Olympics by a man who wanted to show off the gym equipment his company had installed on-site.

And what equipment, what a gym it was. For the third Games in succession, Italian company Technogym are the official suppliers of gym equipment to the athletes. All over the Olympic site, too - 1,000 machines in 20 gyms at the various venues.

So if you are going for a work-out this evening, tomorrow morning or lunchtime and it is a Technogym bike or elliptical that you are using, allow yourself to dream that all that separates you from the Olympics is seven time zones.

Naturally, I wasn't about to attempt even to touch one of the machines for fear that someone might confuse me with a competitor. Ha, fat chance of that.

No, I settled instead for watching the Brazil women's handball team play around on the Kinesis machine - a system of pulleys and balances that stretch a body this way and that.

And watching a Cuban athlete of some description - no, I didn't recognise him, primarily because he didn't have his athlete number pinned to his training vest - stretching the way God had intended on the FLEXability machine.

Talking of God, there is a church in the village which caters for every religion. There is also a restaurant that stretches as far as the eye can see with 600 seats and which satisfies every palate, including those with a taste for McDonald's. Forget drug testing, discovering which athletes have been sneaking off for a Big Mac would be more revealing as a means of assessing extraordinary performances.

Women's world tennis number one Jelena Jankovic was just leaving when I was shown in - the restaurant, that is, not McDonald's.

Over in the housing blocks, Britain's golden swimming girl, Rebecca Adlington (pictured) was sauntering along with a teammate. Had I been able to spend a hour or two there, I may very well have produced a Who's Who list from the village, but Jelena and Rebecca aren't bad for starters.

And what I really wanted to investigate was the Pin Trading Centre in the outer section of the Olympic Village. Yes, people really do exchange little metal pins with each other in a collecting fad that has other countries transfixed, but not Britain. And some of them were at when I peeked in.

Being in the village in the morning, I wasn't able to witness the games that really matter. Official competitions open to athletes of both sexes and all nationalities and sizes in which prizes are awarded daily.

Don't worry if you didn't win a medal in your chosen sport, win the athletes' village Table Soccer tournament or the Air Hockey or the Shuffleboard or the Billiards and bragging rights will be yours forever.

Or you could just party.

Hello, Goodbye

THE Olympic Games are over. Well, some of them are.

Two hours after Fabian Cancellara (pictured) had crossed the finish line in Juyongguan to win the men's road cycling time-trial, and after the cyclists had all departed back down the mountain and rejoined the Badaling Highway to Beijing, the legions of volunteers manning the steps and exits, the gates and stands, the media room and the riders' enclave began to dismantle one of the sites of this year's Olympics.

Down came the national flags fluttering at the top of the flagpoles. Every country that was represented in the four road racing disciplines had its flag proudly displayed along the flank of the ancient village inside this particular holding post on the Great Wall of China.

Now that they had all gone, so their flags were lowered, neatly folded and packed away into cardboard boxes. What their final destination was, who knows?

Perhaps they will be rehoisted at the Modern Pentathlon venue, or maybe at the Ming Tomb Reservoir in the Changping district of Beijing where the Triathlon takes place next Monday and Tuesday.

The Olympics, you see, is a revolving carousel of events. If it ever stands still, it will stop. Some athletes have already left Beijing, others are yet to arrive from their team's holding camps.

And while some venues have yet to open their doors to competition, others are closing - six years of preparation, followed by a few days of medal-chasing activity and then, nothing.

So it was at Juyongguan and up the mountain at Badaling, except that in their cases, of course, the Olympics are but the merest blip in the 2000-year history of the greatest man-made edifice on earth.

The Great Wall survived very nicely thank you between the times of the ancient Olympiads in Greece and the founding of the modern Games in 1896.

The same cannot be said of the volunteers at Juyongguan and Badaling. Their moment in the smog has come to an end. And there they stood, holding their souvenir cuddly mascots, clutching a start list for the women's road race or a printed sign - things to prove that they were there when the Olympics came to China.

There was silence among the chatter. You got the feeling they didn't know what to say or where to look, still less what to do. Their roles had been fulfilled with the utmost diligence and courtesy and now they were ex-volunteers. The Olympics will go on, but they will become spectators to the greatest sporting circus in the world rather than the cogs that make the whole operation work.

It was quite sad to see such emptiness, even if it was partly masked by the pride that they had played their part.

Their memories will be the same as our memories. Nicole Cooke reaching for the line on a day when the course had been turned into a mini-lake, tiny Emma Pooley (pictured above with Cooke) flying up the hill to Badaling and Cancellara collapsing in a heap of elation and exhaustion after crossing the line.

For the media, we move on. To gymnastics or badminton or taekwondo. We will not remember their faces, still less their names, but without them, the Games would have ground to a shuddering halt.