Countdown to the "Games"

08/08 2008 will be an unusual day for the 1.3 billion people in China as well as all the overseas Chinese since the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics 2008 will officially start the grandest sports games which are hold every four years. Chinese people's blood began to boil when the Chairman of IOC declared the host city of 2008 Olympics, that is, a name cannot be more familiar, Beijing. It was 2001 then, when my age just changed into a two-digit number. At that time, I thought, seven years later, I will be in Senior High School Year 2 and will be old enough to travel to Beijing to see the Olympics. That proved to be an unachievable dream now since I am in Sec3 in an island instead of in High School Year 2 in mainland.

The first Olympic Games I watched was 2000 Sydney Olympics. I still rememberd one day when I was having afternoon lessons in Primary 3, the school radio asked us to switch on the class TV and watch the Games. It was acrobatics, one part of the opening ceremony. Since we were of the different time zone as Sydney, so we could watch the night performance in the afternoon. However, the 2000 Games did not impress me a lot, majorly because at that time I did not have so much passion in sports. Primary 3 was still a time when I trained in Choir everyday after school and indulged myself in the endless TV drama series every night after dinner. Actions, strength and velocity did not attract me as much as actors and actresses did.

The situation drastically changed when the 2002 World Cup began. It was when I began to take an interest in World Cup and then, all sports. In summer, 2002, I bought countless football magazines and could not remember how many soccer stars I marked with a heart to show my affection. Brazil won, that was for certain, yet I began to search more stars in other sporting arenas. Unfortunately, in 2004, when I felt obliged to watch the whole Athens Olympics, my ambition faltered as I stepped into Junior High School and was "compelled" to attend the usual military training. The training was hold in a secret military base in another town and lasted for one whole week, the week during which the Games were going on in excitement. We had no media access, so we sadly spent the time in the training camp, unable to find out how many times Chinese national anthem was sounded in the Athens Stadium.

03/o8/2003, the amblem of 08 Beijing Olympic Games was revealed at Tian Tan（天坛）, Beijing. It was a character "京" making into a running man, symbolising the Olympic spirits: higher, swifter, stronger. Deng Yaping（邓亚萍） and Cheng Long（成龙）officially disclosed the amblem; the blood of Chinese people was boiling again, including mine. It was really an exciting moment to see a country rising up as a "power", especially when you are well aware of ancient Chinese history, during which humiliation, struggle and backwardness dominated the whole nation.

Now, we are standing at the point which I have antipated seven years ago. Two days later, the dream of 1.3 billlion will come true. The Games will not be tarnished by any negative reports or turmoils happened in the previous months, because only we know how far we have come through, how many changed we have made. We know that it is such an honour to host the Game, and it is such a big challenge to organise it smoothly in such a tunultuous time. And we managed to do it well. That is what makes us feel so viscerally heartened.