Beijing Olympics

Kudos to the Chinese for producing an absolutely magnificent opening ceremony. Using their most abundant resource, their people, they had about 15000 performers, and about 15000 firework shells to create a truly impressive show.

So I'm getting into the Olympics. It's a fantastic event. But I remain of the opinion that Beijing should never have been chosen to host the Olympics. Reasons are basically because of their pollution, their lack of human rights, the lack of transparency by restricting media's access to the internet and what they can and can't report. The sort of things that everyone has read about.

One thing that I think is quite appalling, aside from the aforementioned, is that to combat the pollution, the Chinese government has made a compulsory shutdown for the duration of the olympics for all factories. Has the government compensated the factory workers, some of the poorest people in all of Beijing, for their loss of income? Sadly, the answer is no. This information was from a friend of my mum's, who owns a company over in Beijing. Further to this, by "combating pollution", what the government has actually done is simply move the factories from Beijing to neighbouring villages so they can pollute away from the city.

But anyway, back to a little commentary on something that particularly caught my attention yesterday. Specifically: women's 48kg weightlifting. This was the event that gave China their first gold medal. I was watching these tiny girls lifting +100kg above their heads. The winner of the event was a chinese girl called Chen Xiexia. She lifted 95kg in the snatch and 117kg in the clean and jerk. I just can't fathom it. How does someone less than 48kg lift 117kg over her head?!? It just seems to go against nature.

My next must-see event is going to be the Olyroos play Argentina at 7pm AEST. I'm a realist; I know we're not going to beat them. But we could draw. We really really could. So go Aussie go!!