Month: August 2008

Superlatives don’t fail me now

I just returned from the National Stadium at the Beijing Olympic Green, aka the Bird’s Nest, site of the well-watched opening ceremonies last week, and where today athletics debuted for the first time on a floor where Chinese director Zhang Yimou blew away the world with 2,000 drummers, dancing calligraphers, and the unscrolling of 5,000 years of Chinese history. Being the Olympic purist I am, all the psychic unrest caused by my first Olympic event – Beach Volleyball in the Rain – was undone in an instant when I saw the women’s heptathalon heats and disci flying, sprinters, sprinting and shot puts putting.

The only medals final was the men’s shotput. Big beefy guys launching 16 pounds of iron as far as they could, while on the other side of the stadium a dozen gazelle-like sprinters limbered up for the 3,000 meter steeplechase. Radio controlled cars returned the discus to the thrower. Choreographed squads of helper set out hurdles for the 400 meter men … it was an amazing spectacle of multi-tasking track-and-field with announcements made in Mandarin, French, and English, replays on the huge displays at each pole of the gigantic bean shaped stadium.. The crowd was nuts. Face painters and flag wavers … it was hard not to start yelling for the American shot putter Chris Cantwell as he threw for a silver medal tonight. I may have to be a face painter at rowing on Sunday.

I tried to take it all in, first with the camera, then with the video camera – there was always something going on some place in the vastness of the stadium. Finally I just let it sink in, pretty blown away by my utterly perfect seats 20 rows back from the track on the 50-meter line.

I have some 500 photos to process, and as the Florida fishing guide told me once after I caught a fish: “Even a blind squirrel bumps into a nut now and then …” there might be three or four worth posting. But, alas, to bed. Photo work will have to wait until after the Games.

My Olympic Flickr stream is here.

A Little Randomness from the Celestial Kingdom

Left turns and directions: there are few things more exciting in Beijing than a left turn in a cab in the face of an ongoing tour bus with no intention to ever slow or stop. I am now squeezing in behind the driver’s side of the back seat, figuring that gives me a couple feet of dead air when the right side of the vehicle gets stove in. All cab rides are high drama. Non-Mandarin speakers must carry a card with the destination written on it. The drivers always, without exception, scrutinize it, look puzzled, shrug, and then take off with great determination. I spend the ride worrying I am about to get launched into an episode of Lost. I always make it and have started to relax.

Score: I hold rowing finals tickets: that’s right, I was all freaky this morning, looking at the number one resolution I made with myself which was to see Elle Logan and Caroline Lind row in the US Women’s Eight in the rowing finals on Sunday afternoon. It wasn’t looking good. I was searching scalper sites and the damage was going to be ugly, then lo and behold our “Ticketmaster”, Steve Crutchfield said, “I think we have rowing tickets.”

Well, Lenovo did have tickets and I am now holding them because no one else wanted them. I am going to Shunyi Sunday afternoon at 3:30, ready to cheer and see my first Olympic rowing, the medal finals for both men and women.

Wuatodetwect: when I log into the hotel network at the Grand Hyatt sites like Google assume from the origin of the IP address that I am in China (which is correct) and therefore want to see their site in Mandarin (which I do not). I can’t find the link on the mandarin page that says “change the language” so I end up blindly clicking until I get to where I am now, which is Elmer Fudd.

I also see that Google thinks I am in Hong Kong, which I am not, but which leads to me think of the conspiracy theory something is going on with IP addressing that will insure people in high end hotels like the Hyatt see what they want to see when they are online (I literally have nothing firewalled or blocked right now).

Beijing Video Dump

When it is midnight and the day has been too long, it is time to do a video dump. Here goes.

Rohit Bhargava and Kaitlyn Wilkins got into the iLounge on daypasses today with their FlipCams and kicked butt with a ton of good interviews with the athlete bloggers. Check out the YouTube channel, LenovoAthleteBlogger. I like South African kayaker Shaun Rubenstein’s observation that the athlete blog movement is gaining steam among his fellow kayakers who want to stay “trendy.”

I had dinner at the Temple of the Five Pagodas, or Wutasi, near the Beijing Zoo. The place is incredibly beautiful and 500 years old. This was with our VIP guests and I sat with Jeff Levick from Google. I liked the music ladies a lot. The calligraphy over the round table — original poem drawn by Mao himself.

On the Olympic Green on Wednesday I saw this hallucination:

I was interviewed at the USA House this morning by Loretta Chao at the Wall Street Journal.  When she was interviewing our CMO I decided to film her filming him. The audio is useless. But hey. It’s content. Go complain elsewhere.

CNBC

Big day for us. CNBC says we’re doing the best job of any of the Olympic sponsors and third in terms of traditional media mentions after McDonalds and Coke.  .  I remain paranoid, taking nothing for granted, this is not the time for self-congratulations and now we’re about to light up the afterburners with a much bigger online promotional play. Our teams in Bangalore and New York are now sharing in the sleeplessness.

Yo, CNBC, make your video embeddable.

FT.com – A golden opportunity? How Chinese brands are betting on an Olympic boost

Richard from the comments points to a piece in the Financial Times and this quote:

“David Melançon, a partner at the Ito Partnership, a brand consultancy, says he is impressed with Lenovo’s efforts to connect with potential customers through blogging and social networking during the games.”

FT.com / Comment & analysis / Analysis – A golden opportunity? How Chinese brands are betting on an Olympic boost.

Flair Slut

Big Olympic cliche is the trading of pins. Little medal/enamel trinkets. I thought it was an athlete thing — “I’ll trade you my Russia for your USA pin” — but it turns out everybody from the sponsors  to the teams to cities bidding for future Games are in on the action.

If you are cool (I saw this first on colleague Andrew Barron) you show off your pins on the neck ribbon that holds your security pass. As of today I have contracted pin fever and am as manic as a jackdaw (I think that is the name of the bird that steals shiny objects to decorate its nest). Here is my collection after five days. I am on track to make my flair quota.

Lenovo Olympic War Room

This is where I spend a good portion of every day here in Beijing. A board room two floors below the lobby of the Beijing Grand Hyatt next to our VIP guest hospitality center. This is the central nervous system for tickets, transportation to and from the Olympic venues, planning, fire fighting, special requests and your’s truly, Lenovo’s Olympic Blogger-in-Chief.

I don’t do much except clean the empties off the desk so we don’t spill coffee on the spreadsheets and flow charts.

From left to right is Mike Cunningham, he’s our Mister Wolf (Pulp Fiction reference) who can make anything happen. Melissa Herb is the quarterback, she works as a liason with all the different Lenovo leaders and makes sure it all goes according to plan.  Julie Gifford is in charge of transportation logistics. She has a walkie talkie in one ear and a cell phone in the other. She makes air traffic control look easy. Jenni Morgan seems to do everything — juggling more balls and details than can be imagined. And finally, Tom Grimes is the man on the scene at the Olympic Hospitality Center. This crew sometimes operates on three hours of sleep per day, never knows what the weather is like outside unless someone tells them, and yet is the source of the funniest repartee I’ve seen since the newsroom of PC Week in the early 80s.

That’s only the tip of the iceberg. Next door is a huge room with about 40 people in it. Stacks of t-shirts, Olympic pins, IT dudes, junk food, weird hotel food, big signs so guests won’t get lost, drivers, printers, tired people, happy people ….

My complaint is the TV in the war room does not get NBC (NBC is camped at the St. Regis so there is NBC there of course) and so we watch China television which only shows Chinese athletes winning Chinese medals and then every so often does 30 minutes of economic news which is usually scenes of farms, dams, livestock, wind farms, coal fired electical generation plants, and every now and then a Lenovo ad.

Row2k Coverage: Olympic Games Blog

Row2k Coverage: Olympic Games Blog.

I just discovered Row2K’s blog. Ed Hewitt delivers the best rowing coverage anywhere, anytime (and I send him a PayPal payment from time to time to keep Row2K rolling).

Anyway, he has Brad Lewis (gold, LA 1984, Assault on Lake Casitas) Xeno Mueller (Gold, Atlanta 96, Silver ’00, Iron Oarsman) guest blogging from Beijing and Shunyi.  Man I wish I could join them. I am starting to get frantic to get out of the basement of the Hyatt and out to the venue to see some serious rowing!

Oh well, here to work, not to spectate.

Flaming doofus

Taken at our product showcase on the Olympic Green yesterday. Have a choice of three backgrounds. Great Wall. Bird’s Nest. Water Cube.

Operating on minimal sleep now. No time to be intelligent. Photos uploading now.