Despite protests to the contrary from the powers that be in Beijing, the Summer Olympics have had had many unfilled seats. The Beijing Olympic Committee, of course, has a much different interpretation of why seats might be unoccupied. According to them, it's the heat.
The official line is that the Games are sold out, according to the Beijing Olympic Organising Committee (BOCOG). But journalists and visitors have noticed many empty seats, raising suspicions about these claims.
A senior BOCOG official has said he is concerned about the empty seats, blaming the hot, humid weather for the poor turnout.
Of course the Western media has picked up on the fact that not everything at this year's Olympics are what they appear to be at first glance.
The whitewashing doesn't end with the "cheerleaders" either. There was the famed lip-synching incident as well as fakery in the opening ceremony fireworks displayed. Almost every aspect of the games has been stage managed carefully.
Each day Bocog's media chief, Wang Wei, and its spokesman, Sun Weide, take to the podium, along with the International Olympic Committee's spokeswoman and a couple of special guests. Yesterday's special guests were the Games' director of security, who looked as if he would rather be stapling his eyelids to the floor than sitting there, and the IOC executive director, Gilbert Felli, who appears to have drunk deep from the Chinese Kool-Aid. Felli does only two adjectives: "happy" and "fantastic". They even find their way into his wildly credible anecdotes, one of which detailed Jacques Rogge's decision to take breakfast in the athletes' village, desperately hoping no one would recognise him and feel he was bothering them. "But more than 15 athletes came to see him," gibbered Felli, "and said 'President thank you, it's fantastic, we have never seen a village like this, we have never seen conditions like this.'"
What the eventual outcome will be from these Olympics will be anybody's guess. The games were meant to showcase China as a great global power, but clearly their "democratic" institutions are lacking in many ways.
