A place of legends: the Olympic Games proves its capacity for greatness againSimon Barnes in BeijingThere are three ways of enjoying sport, and they form a hierarchy. The three categories can mingle and merge, any two together or all three at once. But they still form three easily separated categories and there is no question as to which is the highest. I have spent the past 16 days in remorseless, painstaking and thrilling search for the sport of the third kind, and I encountered it on at least four occasions.The lowest of these categories is partisanship: us lot beating them lot, our bloke beating their bloke - and it's the most wonderful fun, especially when you win. Partisanship is the bread and butter of the sports industry: loyalty, identification, cheering for your team, your man, feeling absurdly glad when you win and suffering the most ridiculous pain when you lose. One world, one dream, and that dream is to beat the crap out of everybody else. Partisanship is Tim Henman at Wimbledon: agonising desperation for a mere result, glorious and painful to experience because of the extreme identification of audience and athlete.This has been a great Games for British partisanship, but I haven't been around many British medals. I managed only a single gold and that was more by luck than judgment. I had gone to the Water Cube for quite other reasons when I watched the superb Rebecca Adlington win her first gold medal, in the 400 metres freestyle. It was the first British swimming gold for women for 48 years and it was a moment to savour.The middle category is drama. Drama effortlessly sheds the chains of partisanship. In Wimbledon terms, this was the Goran Ivanisevic final, in which Ivanisevic kept double faulting on match point, kissing tennis balls, calling to the heavens and, eventually, won. It was an amazing match, but sport can still do better than this.The men's super-heavyweight weightlifting supplies drama at every Olympic Games and the event is a real favourite of mine. This time, the drama was greater even than usual; an unexpected and glorious victory for Matthias Steiner, of Germany, with the last lift of the competition. He then burst into tears, cavorted about the stage in a mad dance like a giant baby in his romper suit, accepted his gold medal and held it up, holding in his other hand a picture of his wife, who was killed in a car crash last year. As drama goes, this was pretty rich.You can get partisanship and drama together; very often, in fact,because drama feeds off intensity of feeling. It is partisanship that gives such drama to the doings of the England football team. England's most recent competitive match, in which they lost to Croatia at Wembley, was not without its dramatic side; the strategy was a farce and the result was a tragedy.But let us move up to sport of the third kind. It is this category I have been looking for at these Olympic Games and, for that matter, at every Olympic Games of the six I have attended. It is a good place to look - you are more likely to find this category at the Games than at any other sporting event. The third category is greatness.In Wimbledon terms, it is the best of the Sampras finals. Those unaware or unappreciative of the third category found Sampras boring. One can only have pity for people who find greatness boring.At these Games, I have turned myself into a greatness hunter, a tart for greatness, if you prefer. And I found it, and it was better than all those lovely British medals, and better than all that wonderful drama - the sort of drama that we found at the taekwondo at the weekend, when a Cuban kicked a referee in the head and Sarah Stevenson, of Great Britain, won a bronze medal and left on crutches.At these Games, I first encountered greatness at the swimming pool, where I watched Michael Phelps make his inexorable way to eight gold medals. Eight at a single Games beats the record of Mark Spitz. Phelps now has 14 in all, five more than anyone else in history - and he's eyeing up London. Some say that swimming medals are cheap. No Olympic medal is cheap. There's only one swimmer - Spitz - among the four athletes who have a total of nine gold medals to their names.Phelps's eight triumphs were played out without fuss and with little attendant drama. His face, shorn of the louche beard and the tangled mop he wore before the Games, is the essence of blandness, his remarks in victory little better. Being the most decorated Olympian ever is “kinda neat”.But never mind that. What counts is the remorseless drive for perfection, the extraordinary talent, the unstoppable desire to express that talent and, thereby, to redefine our understanding of the possible. That's greatness. Sport can bring us such a thing and do it more vividly than anything else on earth.Then there was Yelena Isinbayeva, the soaring woman of the Bird's Nest stadium, a glorious emblem of all the aspirations of womankind andof humankind, waiting patiently while her pole vault rivals fought for the minor medals before emerging from a kind of coma to put on The Me Show: six jumps, two successes, teasing out the drama and taking it one notch higher, to transform drama into greatness. She even gave us a precise figure for greatness: 5.05 metres, a world record.It was unforgettable: a beautiful woman, a superb athlete, flying into the night sky, soaring like the human spirit, a perfect symbol of the hope we have for ourselves and for the world. Isinbayeva told us that all things are possible, that we can leave the base earth behind and soar to unimaginable levels of greatness. It was a night that enriched all who saw it.All the same, one Games, one star. Usain Bolt, the gawky Jamaican giant, ran faster than anyone has run before, faster than anyone has considered running, and he did so without really trying. We will argue for ever about how fast he might have gone had he not felt the incontinent need to celebrate his victory in the 100 metres with 20 metres still to run.I shall never forget the sight, looking down from a canny position above and a little beyond the finish line: the field shredded behind him, the giant with his endless arms outspread like the wings of an albatross, doing the high-step as he didn't run, but danced over the line to win in a time of 9.69sec. Four days later he broke a second world record, this time in the 200 metres, running every stride with consummate seriousness.All this is greatness. True, it is not greatness as in Shakespeare or Leonardo da Vinci, or in the saints and martyrs. These three great athletes have not ended political strife, put the ecological holocaust into reverse, cured Aids and ended global warming. They haven't done anything of any use whatsoever. What they have done, in any severe analysis, is trivial and unimportant.But greatness can never be trivial. A level of achievement that goes beyond anything done before cannot fail to be vivid and meaningful and inspiring. That's why these great events, though mere games, mean so much to us. Great events, great achievements, great athletes catch our imaginations and enrich our lives - and that is what the Olympic Games are for.第二篇：winter is coming ... To the world cupWhat do you do to make the crazy idea of a World Cup in Qatar a little less crazy? If you're Joseph "Sepp" Blatter, president of global soccer's governing body, you switch the tournament from the summer to the winter. Apparently, he didn't realize that making a winter World Cup a success may be an even bigger challenge.The decision to award Qatar the 2022 World Cup was perhaps the most bizarre in FIFA's history. Until then, every host country had been decent at soccer and had boasted a population bigger than the tournament's total attendance. Today, Qatar has about the same population, about 1.8 million, that Uruguay did when it hosted the first World Cup in 1930. But attendance then was below 600,000; at the last World Cup, in South Africa in 2010, 3.2 million seats were filled.Either a lot of people are going to have to go to Qatar to match that figure, or the Qataris are each going to have to attend a lot of matches. Unlike most people, they can probably afford to, with income per capita soon to hit $100,000. There isn't exactly a lot of competition in the market for flights to Doha, either; only a handful of airlines fly there from outside the region.Climate has been another obvious issue. The Qataris promised to build air-conditioned stadiums, but they may have neglected the fact that much of what's enjoyable about a World Cup happens outside, in the streets and plazas of the host cities, where people chant, kick balls around, and watch matches on big screens until late at night.This omission is not surprising. In most of the recently constructed Gulf cities, there's very little street life to speak of. The fun happens inside private compounds, clubs, restaurants, and hotels. The locals whizz around in expensive cars, and the only people on the streets -- especially in the heat of the day -- tend to be male migrant workers. Often, they don't even have the benefit of sidewalks.Putting the fun back into the World Cup is going to be a challenge for Qatar, as it tries to turn itself into a $200 billion soccer Disneyland. Of course, the legions of wealthy businessmen -- they do tend to be men -- whose companies buy up thousands of seats won't be out on the streets.But soccer isn't just for them.The first step, moving the tournament to the winter, now has the influential endorsement of Blatter, who has been FIFA's president for the past 15 years. His decision has provoked outrage among the real powers in soccer: the top professional teams. For starters, these teams are rarely pleased when their millionaire players go off to play for their respective countries; it's just another opportunity for them to get injured. But placing the tournament in the middle of their seasons, when the players are supposed to be at peak fitness and involved in as many as five lucrative competitions, is equivalent to FIFA stealing part of the return on some very big investments.By the same token, though, the switch to the winter could lead to better soccer games at the World Cup. When teams full of top players fail to meet expectations in the tournament, as France did when it exited after the first round in 2002, observers often blame the rigors of the August-to-May schedule used by most of Europe's big leagues. Players usually take a couple of months off in the summer to recuperate. When they can't, the strain sometimes shows.But the real problem with switching the tournament to the winter has to do with the success of the tournament for FIFA and soccer itself. Sports fans usually enjoy more than one sport. In the winter, several sports besides soccer are in full swing: American football, basketball, ice hockey, and, in 2022, the Winter Olympics. By contrast, summer World Cups coincide with the monotonous middle of the baseball season, some car races, a few international cricket matches, and little else of global importance.As a result, a winter World Cup will face some stern competition for the casual viewer's attention. Will Americans turn off the NFL playoffs to watch Iran play Tunisia? Will the Chinese skip the NBA to tune into Belgium versus Ecuador? At the margins, people who might have switched on a match or two in the summer -- and perhaps become long-term fans of the game -- may make another choice.The winter is also a tougher time for many fans to travel. Except in the lightly populated Southern Hemisphere, most countries have school breaks in the summer. In Europe, which has the biggest base of soccer fans with enough money to go to Qatar, several big countries have fairly standard vacation periods in the summer, too. Faced with the prospect of going to a culturally conservative country without a lot of well-known attractions beyond the World Cup itself, traveling fans may simply opt to stay home.It seems very likely that the inflow of tourists to Qatar will be much smaller than the 300,000 who came to South Africa during the 2010 World Cup. The Qataris may well protect FIFA's ticket sales by putting rear ends in seats, even if they're the same rear ends over and over. Where FIFA stands to lose is in the broadcast revenues. If fewer people are expected to watch, advertising will be less valuable, and networks won't pay as much to show the games.Yet FIFA executives are unlikely to fret much about this. They'll still be wined and dined to the heights of extravagance in Qatar, and they may already have received some rich payoffs for picking the host country in the first place. In this game, only the sport of soccer will lose.。
