Playing Games with the Olympics

The Olympics are underway, and Britain's performance so far has been pretty good. We've got a whole bunch of medals, and today I saw an epic match between Gail Emms and Nathan Robertson, Britain's mixed doubles badminton team, and the second-seeded Chinese team, a match which Emms and Robertson managed to pull back in classic style after looking completely out of it.

But then we get to the news that parts of the opening ceremony were faked, I didn't see it myself at the time, but I've reviewed the sections in question and I'm a little perturbed. We, the international television-viewing public, were shown footage of fireworks which were filmed before the ceremony started and inserted into the live pictures. Other fireworks were computer generated.

I'll probably sound snobbish for saying it, but I don't care if some of the fireworks were computer generated, for the simple reason that it was stupidly obvious and if you were fooled by them you need to have your eyes tested. So when we were having a shot of Beijing shot from a helicopter swooping over the city, I didn't think that the fireworks that were supposedly launched from the buildings and yet managed to keep pace with the copter rather than being zoomed past were real. The only thing about this episode that disturbs me is that one of the world's major powers can't afford better graphics software.

The other fireworks thing annoys me more. Everyone agreed at the time that the opening ceremony was fantastic, epic, beautiful. But it wasn't - it was less epic, less fantastic, less beautiful than the organisers led us to believe. Such basic chicanery seems against the spirit of the games somehow.

The story that's really annoyed me, though, is the incident that seems certain to go down in history as Little-Chinese-Girl-Gate. One of the highlights of the ceremony was a small Chinese girl, cute as a button, standing in the centre of the main arena and singing. Except she wasn't; she was miming. That much doesn't come as much as a surprise; it was pretty obvious from watching that she wasn't singing live. I don't mind that, but I do mind the fact that she was miming to someone elses singing.

The actual singer was a different little Chinese girl. She was the one with the lovely voice, but someone in authority decided that she wasn't cute-as-a-button enough, and so they drafted in a better looking child. Again, it seems to go against the Olympic ideal to favour someone so because of outward appearance, and while I understand that the organisers wanted to present a "perfect" event to the world, to do so by lying to us makes them look, well, dishonest.

Then again, this is China we're talking about. Are we really surprised that a country which has edited the massacre of students by members of its own army entirely out of history is now been shown to be willing to lie to the rest of the world? I'm obviously not comparing the events of Tiannamen Square, with a miming child, but this whole incident is indicative of a country and a culture determined to present a perfect outward appearance no matter the cost.

In any event, changes that were made to the ceremony to make the whole thing appear more perfect have, in being discovered, had exactly the reverse effect. Maybe the rest of the Games will run smoothly and with perfect equanimity, but even the smallest controversy that occurs from now on will be seen to be happening on top of an opening ceremony marked by untruth. That's not what the Olympics should be about.