The Beijing 2008 Olympics took on a heightened sense of reality for me last weekend as I joined the line for tickets by signing up to the official ticketing portal.
Although tickets are not immediately available, Chinese nationals and foreigners living in the country need to register their personal information as a web account to join the queue.
To my relief, registering is fairly easy - apart from a niggly verification code that is hard to read and looks more like a color blindness test.
Due to anticipated levels of over-subscription, I'm expecting further instructions on how the tickets will be allocated through random draws. Tickets will not be delivered until June 2008.
Luckily, there will be many diversions during the long wait. This year, Beijing has planned a variety of high-profile sporting events, including a National Football League game and a friendly match between European champions Barcelona and Chinese Super League club Beijing Guo'an.
Besides this, thousands of athletes will flock to the city to contest over 20 test events including rowing, hockey, beach volleyball, baseball, archery and tennis that are designed test the readiness of organizers, as well as the dozens of newly-built Olympic venues.
Almost three years ago, Beijing announced an ambitious plan to become an international sports center, on the back of China's first-ever Olympic Games. The unusually vibrant sports scene this year begs the question: Has Beijing already turned into a magnet for large-scale sporting events, or will the glory and legacy of the Games be short-lived?
There is no official answer yet. But research indicates that the city needs to overcome several challenges to be internationally attractive, with or without the Games.
For example, Ren Hai, a leading expert with the General Administration of Sport, has compared Beijing with New York and London, two traditional hotbeds of international sports. Here are some of his findings:
While New York is home to the New York Yankees, Mets, Knicks, Liberty and Rangers, and London hosts Premier League teams like Arsenal , Chelsea, Tottenham Hotspur, Fulham and West Ham United, Beijing has no world-class sports clubs or teams.
While New York and London host the largest marathons and tennis tournaments in the world, Beijing may have to improve the management and organization of such events.
In comparison with these foreign counterparts, Beijing tends to organize sports for residents for demonstrative purposes, often meaning that they are too rigid and uniform, lacking liveliness or spontaneity.
While the sports scene in New York is highly profitable and helps boost the local economy, it's a fragmented and money-losing business for most sports operations in Beijing.
About 41 percent of the 6,100 sports facilities in Beijing are not open to the public, mainly because many are on campuses.
That said, Ren is quick to point out that there has never been a better time for Beijing to become an international sports center, using the Olympic Games as a catalyst. He sets forth this position in his paper in the recently published "The Cultural Development Report of Beijing 2007."
He suggests that the city should make greater efforts to develop brand-name sports such as the Beijing Marathon and the China Tennis Open, promote grass-roots sporting activities involving more volunteers, open more facilities to the public and improve the way sports are managed.
It may boil down to a simple strategy that enables people to start, stay and succeed in sport at every level, as London has done for its vision to be an active and successful sporting capital.
