Clusterfuck. That's what happens when you have a bunch of athletes primed for excellence heading into a hot zone - a noxious fog, which is exactly what the sky above Beijing is.
I've lived in Seoul, a city with the approximate conditions, and like many other foreigners, I quickly became very sick. An American roommate - a 24 year old free climber - was coughing blood within a few weeks of arriving. Most people who spend more than a few weeks in those conditions simply get sick. It's a combination of filthy atmosphere, adjusting to buying water not only to drink but to cook with (heavy metals in tap water), and then a large adjustment in terms of diet.
I can't imagine a more tricky scenario than inviting a bunch of athletes into this scenario, and expecting them to perform at their peak, let alone stay healthy. I'm sure many of the athletes will pull it off. But many won't. Expect a chronic backlash.
In a way I feel sorry for the Chinese, who are trying hard to please. On the other hand, they have cheated on the pollution levels all along,and so it's no surprise that they remain about double the healthy level (at least). There's a price to pay for reality.
This habit of cooking the figures is happening all over. People think if you change the figures, you change reality. Not, you just change the perception of reality. Reality eventually catches up, and when it does, there is hell to pay. Examples of this are everywhere - South Africa's unemployment figures, our inflation stats, our crime stats. In the US the housing bubble was based on phantom accounting. Our ongoing delusion that oil is cheap and will be cheap forever more is of course the ultimate clusterfuck. Not sure what a clusterfuck is? It's a systemic failure. It's where one system fails, leading to another system failing and so on. It happens when we lie to ourselves, and then pile lie onto lie onto lie. When reality erupts, it does so like Mount Vesuvius over Pompeii, sorry to say.
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