Beyond the facade, the Olympics made memories — not all of them good

BEIJING — The stadiums were stunning. The buses ran with German precision.

The air, if not pristine, proved mostly breathable. The Olympic Green was a triumph of design.

The plentiful volunteers never stopped smiling. The military gate guards never stopped standing at attention.

At some point, however, in the Olympic Games of Beijing, we all had the same thought, that moment of clarity where we realized that it was all too good to be true.

Admittedly, $43 billion will buy you a lot of Olympics. By contrast, the Greek government's Olympic budget four years ago in Athens was $8 billion.

Little, if anything, in other words, was spared in the making of this Olympics.

Take Sunday, for example, and the closing ceremony. When the Olympic flag and those of Greece, Great Britain and China were raised, they rippled smartly in the night's breeze.

Except there was no breeze at the Bird's Nest national stadium, where the air on most nights was compared to the inside of a coffin.

To make the flags stand like the soldiers at attention, Chinese organizers used flagpoles with fans installed in the tops.

That, in itself, doesn't make an Olympic host evil. But there were enough little things like that during these Beijing Games — the lip-synching little girl, the lack of protesters, Joey Cheek's denied visa, the brazen Internet censorship — that it began to smell like a pattern.

In a country of 1.3 billion people, there is always going to be ample manpower to assign to any problem. In a nation where policy is dictated by a sovereign ruling class, the rulers are always going to decide what's best for the people.

It was inevitable, I suppose, that the International Olympic Committee would one day award the Games to the world's most populous nation. The IOC has always fancied itself as a peace broker. Its naivete is that when it has awarded the Olympics to what it felt were deserving nations, it has failed to consider the validation that it might bestow on the nation's rulers.

The 1936 Berlin Games, for example, gave a global stage to a murderous dictator.

Modern China's record on human rights caused immediate howls when the IOC awarded the Games in 2001. But as journalists who peered under the Chinese rug saw these past three weeks, China's restrictions on freedom go far beyond Tibet and Darfur.