The Good News-Bad News On The 2008 Beijing Olympics

Here's some of the updates crawling around the web about next year's Beijing Olympics. The main Good News is human rights activists are losing their fight to encourage more in boycotting the Olympics. The bad news is human rights activists are losing their fight to encourage more in boycotting the Olympics. Hahaha...

Kidding aside, with the amount of publicity the 2008 Beijing Olympics gets, it is blogging about it only gets better. In any case, I think many of the past Olympic events had their own share of controversies. I think next year's Olympics is no different.

The Good News:

Testing the course for the 2008 Olympic road race--The 2008 Summer Olympics are only a year away, and cyclists raced on the bike course Saturday to test the conditions. Bosisio Gabriele of Italy won the 2007 Good Luck Beijing International Road Cycling Tournament in Beijing. The 108-mile course follows the same route that cyclists will take in the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing. However, the course will be longer as three laps will be added to the circuit, making it 152 miles.

Beijing sees Olympics as China's shot at gold--BEIJING- Will it rain on Beijing's parade? That's the big question as Chinese authorities gird themselves for the nation's most ambitious extravaganza on the world stage. With 12,000 TV professionals expected to descend on China's capital a year from now to deliver the coverage to an anticipated 4 billion viewers worldwide, a lot more is at stake than a few medals. For China, the games could prove that a decade of double-digit economic growth has brought with it progress greater than the sum of the country's booming commercial parts.

Beijing venues draw praise--CHINA has done an excellent job in preparing the competition venue for the canoe/kayak slalom racing for the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games, athletes said yesterday. The athletes are taking part in the "2007 Good Luck Beijing" China Open canoe/kayak slalom, an event organized to test the competition venue and facilities in Beijing's Shunyi District for next August's Games.

Special Olympics flame to light up Seoul today--THE flame of Hope for the 2007 Special Olympic Games will travel through Seoul today after the torch was passed through Greece, Egypt, Britain and the United States. Chinese Special Olympic athletes and police will start the relay at the memorial in front of Seoul Olympic Park and end at Jamsil Olympic Stadium, where the opening and closing ceremony of the 1988 Seoul Olympics were held.

The Bad News:

Lightning Strike Warning for the Olympics--CHINESE meteorologists have warned that the site of most venues for the 2008 Beijing Olympics could suffer a high number of lightning strikes after the Games begin, state media said on today. Lightning has killed 499 people in China so far this year, nearly 200 more than in the same period last year. In an academic paper submitted yesterday to an international conference, Guo Hu, head of the Beijing Meteorological Observatory, and fellow researcher Xiong Yajun said they had studied Beijing lightning data from 1995 to 2005 - and Haidian district was the area most heavily hit. Most of the 31 Beijing Olympic venues are in Haidian and some are open air.

2008 Olympics