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Commentary>A blend of Bolt, Beijing and the Bird's Nest - Lessons for Jamaica's own gold standardWilberne Persaud - Financial Gleaner Columnist |
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The Beijing Olympics was special; successful for the Chinese and Jamaicans too.
China won its bid to host the games in July 2001. They spent seven years creating US$43 billion worth of infrastructure with imaginative vision as a bridge to the future.
China's political directorate is attempting a precarious enterprise. They are embarked on a balancing act that is difficult to achieve, difficult to describe, like a juggler twirling seven bowling pins while walking across a gorge, without a net, on a tight rope.
China Faces:
- Influential protectionist elements advocating tariffs on low cost Chinese products;
- Demographic trends fuelled by a 'one child per family policy' that will lead to premature ageing of an already huge population;
- Political risks of the most rapid urbanisation the world has ever known and dualism of high-tech industrialisation amidst poverty;
- Precarious shift from communist absolute control to managed capitalism;
- Voracious appetite for raw materials;
- Uncertain international economic and financial environment;
- Pollution and climate change.
- Listen to Deng Xiaoping: "It doesn't matter if a cat is black or white, so long as it catches mice. Reform is China's second revolution; poverty is not socialism, to be rich is glorious. Let some people get rich first."
Consider the Bird's Nest stadium.
The Beijing Municipal Commission of Urban Planning announced the competition for its architectural design with this imagery:
"Emerging from the landscape, and shaped by nature, the design will create a simple symbolic link, a bridge, between old and new, between people and country and China with the world.
Floating Water Lily
The design creates an image of a floating water lily, surrounded by petals and blossoms, emerging in a gently undulating pond. The configuration of the stadium symbolises great nature on the earth.
Against the backdrop of sunshiny sky, soft white cloud and green hills are the main originality, along with light pillar that penetrates through white cloud creating nice association.
All of these constitute a charming landscape and become a new scene in Beijing tallying with the substance that coexistence of Olympic Game and nature."
These ideas create a fascinating conceptual document to be read in its entirety.
Herzog and de Meuron the Swiss architectural firm that designed Allianz Arena, home to Bayern Munich and site of FIFA World Cup Football 2006, won the project.
Budget Cut
Initially there was a retractable roof atop the Bird's Nest. This was abandoned in deference to 'value engineering' - or as Steve Burrows of Arup, the associated London-based architectural and engineering firm puts it, before stating the obvious: budget cut! The cut marginally reduced the complexity of the task. The Bird's Nest is as tall as the Eiffel Tower. Its superstructure without retractable roof, weighs 45,000 metric tonnes.
Herzog and de Meuron insist as did the Chinese concept, that an "important principle throughout has been to develop an architecture that will continue to be functional following the games in 2008".
The idea was to create a "new kind of urban site that will attract and generate public life".
They have succeeded. Post Olympics, there are pleasing public spaces to be enjoyed: sunken gardens, bamboo groves, restaurants and shopping.
It will host rock concerts in the future and in many other ways, be a lure to those who go near it.
Marvellous Design
Then there is the National Aquatics Centre or 'Water Cube', a marvellous design, with its unique membrane structure filling out its concept of soap bubbles in environmental harmony; in the process minimising weight and artificial lighting needs.
Visitors arriving at Shanghai's Pudong International airport find state-of-the-art facilities before being transported by the world's fastest train - the maglev built by Germany's Transrapid International, commissioned in 2004.
Yet the countryside is Third World and China must protect peasant farmers from competition. All this adds to what some see as a kind of Olympic concerto, contrived out of contradictions meant to elicit 'oohs!' and 'aahs!' That's of course, one interpretation. Regardless, these are all parts of the live contrasts in China's economy and society fitting the juggler-on-a-tight-rope analogy.
Herzog and de Meuron freely admit that relatively smooth construction of the Bird's Nest was partly guaranteed by their principal client-the Chinese State! They speak of a can-do attitude; that the job simply 'must be done!'
Their Own
They make much of the name Bird's Nest. The Chinese themselves chose the nickname early in the project cycle. They adopted, or rather claimed it as their own "before it had even left the drawing board".
Chinese welders, proud of their unique nest-building find their newly acquired skills needed on another Herzog and de Meuron project.
So as we admire dancers, drummers, and other players of instruments, acrobats and fireworks, we must in the after moments, contemplate seven and more years the Chinese prepared for this event - their 21st century advance.
Their 'juggling' is meant to deliver long term.
No doubt determination, effort, mental and physical focus demonstrated by the Chinese preparing for these games are mirrored by Jamaica's athletes.
They have not indulged in esoteric illegal designer drugs. They didn't have big money available to so many other teams. They had dreams and the will to fulfil them.
They have role models aplenty.
Usain Bolt and Jamaica's Olympic team started preparation years ago just like the Chinese. Their task, admittedly less complex, was no less difficult for each, individually.
Create Infrastructure
The best tribute to them, after awards and street-naming, would be commitment to creating the kind of infrastructure, physical and institutional that makes it routine for us to enjoy the public spaces, expecting excellence in all aspects of national life and not just from them as our representative athletes.
We expect excellence, indeed demand gold from Bolt, so why not from our parks service, our bus services our tax office?
Commitment to excellence can be viral in impact.