It’s time to play

BEIJING – While few were noticing – perhaps because it is impossible to see much through the milky white cloud that passes for air here – some people were engaged in the activity that is the presumed essence of the Olympic Games.

Sports competition.

As has been the case in recent Olympics, the soccer tournament kicked off in outposts far from the host city a couple of days before the Opening Ceremony, a technological and cultural extravaganza being held today involving what may seem like half the inhabitants of the world’s most populous country. (It will be shown on tape by NBC at 7:30 p.m.)

Once China has welcomed the world with the now traditional Opening Ceremony mixture of history lesson and chauvinistic chest-thumping, the 10,000 athletes in 27 sports other than soccer finally will get down to the business of trying to win one of the 931 medals at stake during the next 16 days.

Never has there been an Olympics with a buildup like this, and that doesn’t even include the construction that has transformed Beijing thoroughly or the two main sports facilities that already are grandiloquent architectural landmarks, the “Bird’s Nest” Olympic Stadium and the “Water Cube” aquatics venue.

The thousands of drumbeats that are to herald the start of the Opening Ceremony may sound like faint echoes compared with the antiphonal drumbeat of criticism and defense about pollution, human rights and censorship that has rattled the upcoming Games most of this year.

Beginning Saturday, the splash of arms in water, the whir of bicycle wheels, the thump of feet landing on gymnastics mats and the squeak of sneakers on hardwood floors will create noise that Olympic officials hope resonates across the globe the way the loud discourse has.

By Saturday morning, China likely will have won the first of what most expect to be more gold medals than any of the other 204 national teams in Beijing.

By Saturday afternoon, when cyclists have finished a road race over a demanding, 152-mile course, there will be evidence of whether the quality of the air has affected athletes in an endurance event.

By Sunday morning, U.S. swimmer Michael Phelps will have completed his first race, the 400-meter individual medley, in an effort to win an historic eight gold medals. In that race, countryman Ryan Lochte figures to provide the toughest challenge for Phelps in of any of his five individual events.

And then it will all seem like a whirlwind, so many events going on simultaneously it becomes impossible to keep track of everything, even for those back in the United States glued to the 1,400 hours of television and 2,000 hours of online coverage NBC is providing on a variety of media platforms.

NBC decided swimming is the premier event of the Games and succeeded in having finals moved to the Beijing morning so they could be shown live to U.S. audiences at night.

The medal competition between the United States and China is a major plot line. Chinese athletes won their first Olympic gold medals at the 1984 Los Angeles Summer Games and have gone from 15 then to 32 at Athens in 2004, just four behind the United States.

“This is not a one-time shot opportunity for the Beijing Games,” U.S. Olympic Committee CEO Jim Scherr said of China’s sports commitment. “With the sports infrastructure, the sports facilities, the coaches who are being developed here and the young people who will be inspired by these Games, we think this will be a formidable system that we will have to contend with for a very, very long time.”