Stars and Stripes never looked better

BEIJING – Here is a fun little game. Ask yourself this: If the Opening Ceremonies of the Olympics were being held in Detroit, and you were lucky enough to score a ticket, how would you greet the following people?

The Chinese delegation.

Ron Artest.

The Iraqi delegation.

An American baseball player who had tested positive for steroids.

President George W. Bush.

The Sudanese delegation.

This isn’t so simple, is it? Are you cheering the athletes or the government? The people or their country?

When the Sudanese athletes entered the stadium Friday night, they were met with a silence that I found eerie. I mean, your government is heavily involved in a devastating war in that country, and you react with silence?

But then I thought: What are they supposed to do? Cheer the athletes? Boo the Sudanese government?

The crowd of 91,000 people in the Bird’s Nest doled out nice cheers when Dirk Nowitzki and Kobe Bryant and Roger Federer appeared on the big screens, and of course there was a big one when Yao Ming led the Chinese delegation into the stadium.

The Chinese did cheer as the Americans entered. And I like to think that a few of those cheers were directed at the charismatic 23-year-old carrying the Stars and Stripes.

Lopez Lomong does not want to be the story of the Olympics. But maybe he is, anyway. He was kidnapped at age 6 by rebels in Sudan. In 2000, as a refugee in Kenya, he walked five miles to find a black-and-white TV so he could watch the Olympics. He saw Michael Johnson win gold.

“I said, ‘I’d like to run like that guy,’ ” Lomong said Friday.

He said, too, that he wanted to run for Johnson’s country. This was a ridiculous dream for a kid who got to eat chicken twice a year – on Christmas and Easter. It was boiled, he said, with a lot of salt. But Lomong did not believe his dream was ridiculous. As a boy, he was taught to sleep facing the direction he wanted to go in the morning, just in case he had to get up and go immediately. You survive that, Olympic gold doesn’t seem so impossible.

Lomong was eventually adopted by a family in upstate New York. He will run the 1,500 meters for the United States.

He stopped short of making any statements about China’s involvement in the Sudan conflict Friday.

But that’s OK. His teammates made it for him.

China wants to keep its reprehensible foreign policy tucked away this month. The American athletes shoved the face of the Darfur conflict in front of everybody at the ceremony. It is the face of Lopez Lomong.

Have you ever been so proud of a group of American Olympians? In recent years, the American Olympic movement has been marred by a familiar cycle: Famous athletes are revealed as dopers, and U.S. Olympic Committee chairman Peter Ueberroth issues a statement condemning them.

The athletes shamed Ueberroth here. The USOC big shots have hemmed and hawed on anything related to the war in Darfur – they don’t want to upset their hosts.

The athletes said it all with their vote. People say sports and politics don’t mix. I don’t know about that. The best part of the Olympics is that when sports and politics do mix, sports triumph. Let the games begin.