Al Groh went 4-0 as the Jets’ new coach, then 6-1, on his way to 9-7. Bill Parcells went 8-4, on his way to 9-7. Herman Edwards went 10-6 and got lit up by the Raiders in the playoffs. Eric Mangini—Mangenius!—went 10-6 and got lit up by the Patriots in the playoffs.

And Brett Favre—not a new head coach, but last year’s new idea—swaggered to an 8-3 start, then limped to defeat in four of the final five. With that, the Mangenius era ended, in a flurry of tar and feathers.

So Rex Ryan is another fast starter. That doesn’t make him any different from those who’ve gone before. What sets him apart, not only for Jet fans but for a wider tribe of people who love a particular kind of football, is where he fits into another historical lineage: He is Buddy Ryan’s son, and he could be Buddy Ryan’s heir.

What is that inheritance? The elder Ryan went 55-55-1 as an NFL head coach, never winning a playoff game. Don’t dwell on the head-coaching record. John Gruden and Brian Billick have won Super Bowls. Buddy Ryan was only the defensive coordinator of the 1985 Bears (and the defensive line coach of the Jets team that beat the Colts in Super Bowl III). They carried him off the field after the Super Bowl, after the Bears had given up a total of 10 points in three playoff games.

Whenever a Buddy Ryan team lined up, you were going to see something happen. His defense was a conceptual revolution, attacking instead of reacting, players storming the backfield in unpredictable combinations and from all angles. Nearly 25 years later, as offenses spread wider and receivers keep multiplying, teams are still trying to run away from the ’85 Bears.

That was one part of coaching, the schemes on paper. Another part was the players, who executed Ryan’s plans joyously and savagely. He was a player’s coach, this fat man who’d never played a down in the NFL, who could show up with a playbook and a few loyal veterans and get the existing players to believe they could do this, too.

Now here is Rex Ryan, as stout and loud as his father, fresh from coaching the Baltimore Ravens’ fearsome defense. Along with him are linebacker Bart Scott and diminutive safety Jim Leonhard, the Ravens’ second- and third-leading tacklers last year. On offense, for good measure, he has a gold-dusted rookie quarterback, Mark Sanchez of Southern Cal, and a bunch of tough veterans. The schemes are in place, and the players are making them work.

Does this mean the Jets have a future with Rex Ryan? It was the space in between the coaching ideas and the on-field action, the managerial space, that Buddy Ryan never got the hang of. He was insubordinate, antagonistic and hotheaded, picking fights with opposing coaches, his own colleagues and ownership—fights that wouldn’t blow over after three hours, the way the violence down on the turf would.

The elder Ryan had bad luck—one of his better Philadelphia Eagles teams literally could not find the end zone in the playoffs, lost in billows of Chicago fog—but he often made the worst of it. When the 1987 strike hit, he refused to put any effort into coaching the Eagles’ scab team, winning him a good name with the players and a bad name with the people who hire and fire coaches.

The executives last much longer than the players do. But Buddy Ryan lived for the heated moment. His greatest quarterback was the scrambling, improvising, deep-bombing Randall Cunningham. His defenders aimed to not only stop the play, but to strip the ball; not only to strip the ball, but to try to score with it, lateraling it around if it looked like that might work. If they fumbled back to the offense, well, just try to get it back again.

Rex Ryan saw where that approach got his father, and where it stopped him. He told the Post earlier this year that he had been afraid his own pro-coaching hopes were doomed in 1993, when his father, the defensive coordinator for the Houston Oilers, punched offensive coordinator Kevin Gilbride in the face during a regular-season win because he thought the team was passing too much. Buddy Ryan was correct on the football principles—the Oilers would go on to lose a playoff game in which, playing with the lead against the Chiefs, they threw 43 passes, ran only 14 times and left Joe Montana enough time for a fourth-quarter comeback—but the message was lost in the delivery.

Rexball sounded as reckless as Buddyball going into the second game, when safety Kerry Rhodes announced that the Jets would hit Patriots quarterback Tom Brady “more than six times.” Taunting Bill Belichick’s Patriots seems like taunting a column of army ants—Should we get upset about that, coach?—but the Jets hit Brady seven times, kept New England’s offense out of the end zone and won the game, ending an eight-game Patriots winning streak at the Meadowlands.

Winning a home game against a division rival shouldn’t be much to celebrate: less a milestone than an exit sign for the off-ramp from the Jets’ long road to nowhere. Sunday’s 24-10 loss against New Orleans may have been more telling. The Saints were a superior team. They had three blowout wins, with nine touchdown passes by quarterback Drew Brees already. In all three games, they had scored a touchdown the first time they touched the ball.

This time, the Saints began carving their way downfield again: six plays to cross midfield, three more plays to the Jets 22. Then the Jets dug in. A holding penalty, two rushes, and an incomplete pass, and the Saints stalled out and kicked a field goal.

Motivation is not what players feel coming out of the locker room, whipped up by a big speech. It’s what they believe when they’re colliding with other players out on the field. The Saints had more experience and more weapons; the plays the Jets used to attack downfield looked like New Orleans’ dump-off plays. Sanchez tried to force a deep pass to a receiver who was covered, and the Saints’ safety jumped the route and took it 99 yards the other way for a touchdown.

But the Saints couldn’t shake the Jets off. Brees backpedaled in the shotgun, pulling the defense in with the promise of a deep sack, then floated a screen pass into the vacated space, where the receiver broke loose for 36 yards before a saving tackle at the one-yard line. Four plays later—two gang tackles, two passes thrown away—the ball was still at the one-yard line.

It was a Pyrrhic goal-line stand; given the ball back, Sanchez lingered blankly in his own end zone till the Saints swarmed in, stripped the ball and fell on it for a touchdown.

You can only count on coaching to do so much.

The promise of Rexball is that it can blur the distinction between talent and strategy. A week before the Saints game, against the Tennessee Titans, the Jets sent seven defenders to the line on a third-and-long play: Three lined up in a normal defensive front, and four more stood up, in a bunch, off left tackle—the formation for a gambling monster blitz.

At the snap, though, only four people rushed. Bart Scott rolled off into pass coverage, and two more defenders hung back in the gaps. At left tackle, where the mob had been, linebacker David Harris and the diminutive Leonhard came looping around. The Tennessee blockers found one but not the other, and Leonhard closed in on the pocket from the blind side, untouched. Just before he got there, and as the rest of the pass rush began to cave in the line, the quarterback got rid of the ball, throwing to the sideline, where cornerback Darrelle Revis was waiting to break up the pass. It looked like chaos, but the Jets had every part in the right place. Finally.

editorial@observer.com

But that was the peak. The Manny Ramirez–David Ortiz combo? Ramirez was already serving a drug-test-related suspension, and the news that Ortiz was implicated was just like the news that Ramirez was implicated, only a little fatter and slower.

The idea of the list is much more exciting than the list itself. Everything you didn’t know you knew about performance-enhancing drugs, all in one place. Just let the list out, and let the public stand face to face with the truth about drugs and baseball.

“Name them all and get it over and let baseball go on,” Hank Aaron said. Put the names out, Mark Teixeira said. Put the names out, Johnny Damon said.

Damon’s name is on one list already. The Yankees outfielder is No. 3 on a list of 103 baseball players that you can turn up if you Google “baseball steroids list”—or that you can find even more quickly by Googling “fake steroids list.”

People who post the Internet list like to make a point of saying they don’t really believe what’s on it. There are plenty of forensic criticisms of the list—too many Red Sox (it’s a Yankees fan’s hoax!), too few no-name players, suspicious formatting—but the main objection to the list is a matter of attitude. The steroids scandal is about the feeling of being duped, or worse, letting oneself be duped. So now the desire is to be in the know but also to be knowing, to be wised up.

That said, you wouldn’t care to bet that any particular player on the fake list is not also on the real list. Plenty of the names have already gone into the history books for being otherwise implicated for performance-enhancing drugs—Rafael Palmeiro, Gary Sheffield, Barry Bonds, Benito Santiago—and even more are the sort of names that history has a hard time paying attention to. Wasn’t that journeyman utility infielder already caught for something? What about that slow-footed corner outfielder? Or that other slow-footed corner outfielder? It’s like trying to keep track of who used to play for the Rangers and who used to play for the Astros. Six years is a long time in baseball.

So the Internet list hovers on the edge of public view, not quite fit for discussion. Information does not exactly want to be free, at least not in this case. Information would rather be certified by someone who knows what he or she is doing: The New York Times and Sports Illustrated, the old media of record, slowly digging out the names on the real list, one or two at a time, like scrupulous archaeologists clearing a site with brushes. Look, here we have … what appears to be … yes, here is Sammy Sosa. Definitely Sammy Sosa. Sammy Sosa, “according to lawyers with knowledge of the drug-testing results,” was on the list of players who failed drug tests.

Thanks, lawyers. Come on. You gave up the guy shaped like the Thing, the guy who hit 243 home runs in four years. That’s like shooting a farm-raised pig on a captive hunt. Put the names out!

Or better yet, don’t. The ethical problems are bad enough: Sammy Sosa may be a fraud and a hypocrite, but his drug test was supposed to be anonymous. Turning a private screening program into a public blacklist is a much more serious breach of trust than trashing the home-run record book ever was—even if the list were to tell us what we want to know.

And it won’t. The secret list, the one seized by drug investigators and passed around and leaked, is not the final word on performance-enhancing drugs in baseball. It is a list of 104 names of players who were told in 2003 that they would be tested for drugs, and were then associated with a positive drug-test result. As with any drug-testing program, some of those positives were false positives: Major League Baseball has said that only 96 players were ultimately counted as positive, and that the players’ union disputes some of those 96 results.

So after we learn who the 104 guilty players are, it will be time to get the list of the eight guilty-but-not-guilty players, and then the list of however many players’ guilt that is in dispute. Meanwhile, the list will still be missing all the drug-assisted players who got a false negative, or who took a masking agent, or who had moved on to drugs too advanced for the drug tests to catch.

What can the real list tell us that the fake list can’t? Yes, it would be funny if one of the anti-steroids crusaders like Curt Schilling or Jeff Kent showed up on the list. But it wouldn’t be surprising. Jeff Kent hit more home runs after his 35th birthday than he did before his 30th. Maybe he’s a clean guy who happened to hit like a steroids guy. Nobody knows.

One national sportswriter wrote recently that he would give up on baseball if Derek Jeter’s name showed up on the list, because Jeter seems like a guy who would quit the game rather than “cheat to compete.” That’s nice, but Derek Jeter never refused to cross home plate when a known steroid cheater like Alex Rodriguez or Gary Sheffield knocked him in. He’s a team player, and he plays to win.

Every time a drug list comes up—the fake one, the Mitchell Report, the collected works of Jose Canseco—it looks at first glance as if your favorite team is especially implicated. You can find the suspect list online with the names of all Mets-linked players underlined: 30-some out of 103 players. Those dirty Mets! But it’s mostly perception: Ballplayers knock around, and the Mets’ alumni are other teams’ alumni, too. Gary Sheffield is a Met and a Yankee—and a Brewer, Padre, Dodger, Brave, Marlin and Tiger.

Alex Rodriguez and the Yankees have the best record in the American League at the moment. Manny Ramirez and the Dodgers have the best record in the National League. Here comes baseball history, or more of the same baseball history.

The last championship Yankees were a steroids team. The Red Sox who knocked them off were a steroids team. The Baltimore Orioles who sat in fourth place and watched them were a steroids team. Nobody’s roster was hydroponically grown in a clean room. Everybody comes out of the same dirt.

editorial@observer.com

That was assuming, however, that I was going to be able to tune into any action. Chinese television's interest in the rest of the world waxes and wanes unpredictably. Two seasons ago, the Super Bowl showed up on two different channels; this past season, it was on none. As America waited for the election results, the only sign of the outside world I could find in Beijing was an international swim meet on the sports channel.

Being an expatriate is not the same thing as being a citizen of the world. Ernest Hemingway, the Midwesterner who'd tried exile in Paris and Spain, set out to write a novel about a man fighting on the Communist side in the Spanish Civil War. What he came up with was so red-blooded American that John McCain declared For Whom the Bell Tolls his favorite book, and told of how he'd meditated on its hero while the Communists held him as a prisoner of war.

I rarely feel more American, or prouder to be American, than I do in China. This is particularly true if I am in China and in the presence of Europeans. Pluck a European out of context--take away his grand old cities and his cured meats and his comprehensive social-services systems, and put him against a backdrop as foreign to him as it is to you--and what's left more often than not is a watery-eyed person with silly glasses and mismatched clothes and a pathetic need for cigarettes, a dependence implanted in him through the marketing efforts of American business.

All of which is to say that, of the four or five election-watching parties available, most of my friends were going to the one at the French wine bar. But I wanted to know about Indiana before I could face it. If Indiana went blue when the polls closed, then the predictions were right and Obama was going to win. The last time I picked a state as an indicator was in 2000, when I told myself that if Florida went quickly for Gore, it was going to be an easy night. I hadn't counted on Florida coming back down off the board, which I witnessed in a crowded ballroom at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, D.C., and which indirectly but definitely had led to my ending up by Election Day 2008 in Beijing instead of Silver Spring, Maryland.

Indiana! The Internet was not helping. Fivethirtyeight.com had disappeared behind the Great Firewall sometime in the previous week.

Nobody else had anything at first glance, and before I could start digging, it was time to take the baby to morning preschool. Or pre-preschool, whatever you call it. Another downside to having election might in the morning.

On my way out of the complex where the preschool is, I was passing the doorway of a medical center when I spotted a TV in the waiting room, tuned to CNN. I stopped in my tracks. Kentucky was going for McCain; Obama was behind in Virginia. It was early and tiny and meaningless, but it was impossible not to feel that lurching feeling, like when Florida changed color, or when the first returns on John Kerry started coming in below the exit polls. I swore and stared from the hallway till a receptionist came out from behind her station to have a look at the screen.

I checked the Web again when I got home. No Indiana, but things were moving for Obama. I stuffed my laptop in my backpack and headed for the wine bar.

It was almost a nice day; the Beijing smog, the cost of progress, filtered the otherwise bright autumn morning light, as if the whole city were set off behind tinted glass. Down at the corner market, they had put out a mountain of the year's last cabbages, a tradition held over from the old days of rationed food. On Eastern Drum Tower Avenue, piles of bricks and dirt and paving blocks lined the way. The whole street had been modernized and beautified in advance of the Olympics, but now another round of improvement was underway. A spool of cable thicker than an arm was being unrolled alongside the digging.

When you're a foreigner acting as a foreigner, the city of millions contracts to a small town. Like most parties, the election party was about one-third friends, one-third strangers, and one-third people I had met and probably chatted with but could not place. Some of them were drinking white wine; some were drinking coffee. The gabble of CNN played over the in-house speakers and it took a moment for me to find the television: a medium-large flat screen on the far wall. The video scarcely made it less confusing. In an information-thin environment, American cable news is not like drinking from a firehose; it's like trying to eat peanuts with a spoon out of a bag containing one part peanuts to 20 parts peanut shells and horsehair scraps. Maybe I was tired. I looked longingly at someone's espresso, calculated the effect of concentrated coffee on my agitation, and settled for an entire pot of jasmine tea.

The CNN picture froze as I was starting in on the tea. Bandwidth problem: the wine bar was getting CNN through its Internet connection, and somebody had logged into a video chat on a laptop. The offender was found and disconnected, and the coverage came back. Obama had Ohio. Cheers all around. Virginia was closer than it was supposed to be. I got out my own computer to browse for a few more information-peanuts—which counties were late with the returns, what was happening in the Senate. Maps within maps. On the TV, Elizabeth Dole, with her poor stiff blurry face—and why has mutilation become part of the aging process for American women?—conceded defeat.

Obama was winning, to some extent. It was time to leave the party and go get the baby. He fell asleep in the cab, and I got back on the Internet at home. News began flooding in from the U.S., through instant messaging: Virginia was called for Obama. Fox was calling the race for Obama. I tried to find a video feed from Grant Park. CNN told me my version of Flash wasn't up to date. The Obama Web site asked me for a donation. McCain was conceding. Chinese TV again: Now CCTV International, the English channel, did have it. "...Opportunities to those who all who have the industry and will to seize it..."

Then the station cut away so that the anchor could ask a guest expert, in her BBC English, what this election might mean for China. The MSNBC player was working on my computer: "… to dine at the White House … " CCTV International threw it to a live stand-up from Arizona. The reporter was inside the Biltmore ballroom—"the place," he said, "where John McCain's election event was originally planned." The speech had been moved outside, but he was holding his post indoors, with McCain on giant screens behind him. "As I speak, you can hear this loud noise" from outside, he said.

What had CCTV International heard from voters? It was the economy.

"They're voting for change, they're not happy with how things are handled in the U.S.," the reporter said.

”This is not a surprise win for Barack Obama," he said.

On the MSNBC feed, John McCain's supporters were booing his attempts at graciousness. CCTV International went to a segment of interviews with American troops. Then a station break: the battle against SARS … the Chinese scientist who was the father of hybrid rice … the ubiquitous Liu Xiang, the record-breaking hurdler. A commercial promoted the rock formations of the Yiming Stone Forest--more impressive than the more famous Stone Forest of Yunnan.

The MSNBC folks vamped their way through lunchtime, waiting for Obama. CCTV International moved on to a financial-news program. The anchor was somebody I had met at a party. Obama appeared and gave his speech. Every now and then the image of his face would freeze, but his voice kept flowing.

Three hours later, in traffic, I saw a vendor with an armload of the Beijing Legal Evening News. Obama was on the front page. How much?

Fifty mao, my cab driver said. The vendor doubled the price: 1 RMB. I shoved the bill out the window and got the paper. Ao Ba Ma, the headline said. Meiguo Shouwei Heiren Zongtong. America's First Black President.

The authorities had been blowing smog of their own; local environmental officials and the International Olympic Committee declared that the measured air quality was acceptable and that the press was mistaking normal humid mist for pollution—an old lie, publicly retired by the Chinese government in 2006 and now pressed back into emergency service. Tourism was down, thanks to harassing visa-application procedures, but the Tibet folks had still been able to show up, protest, and get themselves arrested.

And now—a text message arrived from a reporter out at the shooting range—2004 gold medalist Du Li had been beaten in the morning’s air-rifle competition. Du had been favored to win the first gold medal of 2008, so much so that China had assigned special identical-twin attendants to the ceremony, for maximum aesthetic value.

The restaurant’s televisions were tuned to women’s weight lifting, another event where China was favored. But the competitors on the screen were from Canada and Japan. Outside, the peloton of road racers went whizzing by, trailed by little silver station wagons with spare bikes on their roofs. More than a third of the riders would quit before the end of the race (though the majority of post-race quotes seemed to blame the humidity rather than pollution—this after the United States team had been rebuked for wearing filter masks when they got off the airplane).

The weight lifters dropped out, one by one. A contestant from Taiwan lifted 112 kilograms to take the lead in the clean-and-jerk round.

Only then did the Chinese lifter, Chen Xiexia, appear on the screen.

The event was for women up to 48 kilos in weight—a little under 106 pounds. Many of the early-round lifters had been almost slim. Ms. Chen was shorter and wider. She faced a 113-kilo barbell, her first of the day. And she lifted it. Applause filled the room. Then Ms. Chen—shouting “Jia you!” to herself, the all-purpose Chinese cheer—lifted 115.

The Taiwanese lifter tried 115, staggered and fell. No one else was left. The bar was loaded to 117, and Ms. Chen lifted that, too, to close out the scoring. Then she skipped off the stage. She hugged her coach, her broad back to the camera, a pink scrunchy in her hair.

The next morning, Aug. 10, a cleansing downpour began to fall. Ms. Chen’s picture took up the top of the front page of the China Daily.

Below the fold, a yellow box carried the news that Beijing’s Weather Modification Office had successfully intercepted and suppressed oncoming rainstorms on the night of Aug. 8, to keep the opening ceremony dry. The new rainfall, an official told me at a press conference, was completely natural.

Down at the bottom of the page, just above the box with the countdown to the 2008 Beijing Paralympics (27 days), there was a small headline:

“US tourist killed in Beijing attack.” It pointed readers to page five, where a short 13-paragraph story said that a Chinese man had stabbed two American tourists, one fatally, and then jumped to his death from the Drum Tower. “Local authorities are investigating the case,” it said. (The final three paragraphs began: “In another development, Chinese people condemned and protested against five foreigners for fomenting ‘Tibetan independence’ at Tian’anmen Square yesterday noon.”)

In the hours after the attack, as text messages and wire stories flew, it seemed something drastic and irrevocable had happened. A knife attack on foreigners? At the Drum Tower? Most days, if you leap from the Drum Tower, you are likely to land in a foreign correspondent’s coffee mug.

But the story was already withering, as a story. On the American side, it quickly developed into a story about tragedy striking the extended family of the national volleyball team—that sort of tragedy that forces athletes to play valiantly through their tears. Not, unfortunately, a bad sort of tragedy, as far as the Olympics are concerned. And on the Chinese side, the moment of madness and horror was obscured by the procedural and detail-free announcements of the local authorities, as they investigated.

Whatever happened at the Drum Tower was very probably captured by a security camera. Everything is. I watched the opening ceremony and parade of nations on a pair of giant video screens at Ditan Park, with a few thousand other people. There were cheers for Hu Jintao and Juan Antonio Samaranch—the sainted old fascist who helped shepherd Beijing’s bid through the IOC—as well as Pakistan, Israel and Roger Federer. All evening, at the top of a pole, a camera scanned the crowd, pivoting this way and that with lurching, robotic purpose. The People’s Armed Police were posted out on the streets, one after another, wearing uniform jackets buttoned up in the heat, leaving scrawny security guards to control the masses at Ditan. Still, with security stretched to its thinnest, the machines were at work.

Who wants to know what the machinery might know? An unfortunate incident happened, and now it’s over. Also on Aug. 10, the China Daily printed two separate tables of medal standings, both saying the same thing: first place, China, with 2 gold medals, 1 silver and 1 bronze; second place, the United States, with 1 gold, 1 silver and 1 bronze.

American media, at the same point, had the U.S. in first, with 3 medals to China’s 2. There is no official correct way of scoring the medal count, because officially the medal count is a regrettable jingoistic overlay on the pure athletic spirit of the Olympics.

Especially if you’re losing.

Pick your premise: China maintains that silver and bronze don’t count; the United States maintains that third place is as good as first. China’s scoring system is not the traditional one—but if Americans really believe a medal is a medal, let’s see what happens if LeBron James or Michael Phelps comes home with a bronze.

By Tuesday, local time, the philosophical split had become more pronounced. The public-address announcer at Workers’ Stadium during the women’s soccer preliminaries recited the medal standings—the “gold medal standings”—with China comfortably in front. At day’s end, China led 13 to 7. Or, if you prefer, it trailed, 22 to 20.

tscocca@observer.com

Are they? As of today, the old people seemed to be exactly where they've been all month: sitting in twos or threes every 50 yards or so along every roadside, all over the city, wearing white Yanjing Beer polo shirts and red armbands. Or manning the sidewalk volunteer information booths in the neighborhoods.

But all McGrath sees is an army of college students, smiling at him in their Olympic-volunteer polo shirts. This despite an omniscient eye--one that can see right into the soul of a nation:

Or perhaps because, unlike college students, middle-aged people already have jobs? Maybe someone could ask them, if any can be found to be asked. There might be some outside the Olympic Green somewhere?

How, they wanted to know, could The Times best use the 32 credentialed reporters and editors that would cover the Olympics in China?

George Vecsey, the paper’s longtime sports columnist, answered by not talking about sports at all.

He told the group the real story in Beijing over the coming three weeks was not about athletes, but about China, its geopolitical aspirations and how they were staked on the games.

Jill Abramson, the paper’s managing editor, told him he was “exactly right.”

“If I had any fear—and I really don’t with the totality of the coverage—it is we would miss the big story,” Ms. Abramson said afterward in a phone interview.

At another meeting in Beverly Hills two weeks earlier, Dick Ebersol, the chair of NBC Universal Sports & Olympics, was addressing a group of television critics to brief them on NBC’s massive Olympics presence.

“Our primary aim is, as the sole rights holder in the United States, we’re the only way that you can see the major events of the Games,” he told a reporter who asked whether they planned to cover some of the complex political, social and environmental issues surrounding the Games. “So we’re not going to cavalierly blow out events to show—blow out sporting events to show news, but if it’s really news, we’re going to cover it.”

Unlike at The Times, an important division is made here: “Our” job in sports is sports; “their” job in news is news. So who’s got the credentials?

“In the major venues, we have our own cameras. So if something develops during the opening ceremony, we have our own cameras, and we also have both news and sports people ready to comment on that.”

But for news: “They’re sending the all-stars,” he said. Brian Williams, Tom Brokaw, the Today crew, Richard Engel—even a Weather Channel guy! And so, the Olympics are a sports event; and China is a news story. End of story.

OF COURSE, at the time of each of these meetings, both Ms. Abramson and Mr. Ebersol already had a significant contingent of reporters on the ground in China. And before the games have even begun, the relationship between China and the Western press has become a story.

China’s short-tempered and nationalistic online community sparked death threats this past spring against outlets whose coverage of the Lhasa riots was deemed slanted toward the Tibetans. CNN doubled its blacklist status when commentator Jack Cafferty called the Chinese “thugs and goons”—meaning the regime, he said afterward, too late to mollify the public.

Craig Simons, the Asia bureau chief for Cox Newspapers, said that a cab driver this month had asked him if he worked for CNN. Mr. Simons said he did not. The cabbie declared that he would have refused to carry him if he had. “We were on Second Ring Road, in heavy traffic, and he said he’d pull over right there and drop me on the shoulder,” Mr. Simons wrote in an e-mail.

Under these conditions, status and etiquette begin to get slippery.

When President Hu Jintao held a press conference with selected foreign journalists on Aug. 1, it was not clear whether getting an invitation to attend had been a mark of honor or disrepute. The New York Times, one of the non-invited papers, noted that in the state press, “a large photo showed a smiling Mr. Hu shaking hands with foreign journalists, who had been asked to form a receiving line.”

Unwritten: “... and who had complied.”

This is a particular problem for the rights holders. The ethical questions about working with the Chinese are complicated by a philosophical dimension: China is repressive toward journalists, and it is open-handed toward commerce. So which proposition is the truth about freedom in China? And which side are you on?

If journalism is the primary good, the Chinese have a lot to answer for. The Olympic promises of greater access are easily breached. In July, police stepped in to stop a live broadcast from the Great Wall on Germany’s ZDF TV network, ZDF’s East Asia correspondent, Johannes Hano, said. Mr. Hano’s crew had spent months requesting and receiving the necessary permissions, he said. But in the middle of an interview with David Spindler—the Great Wall expert profiled by Peter Hessler in the New Yorker—German morning-show audiences saw police stick their hands over the camera lens.

“They told us, in the U.S. there’s no Great Wall, so there couldn’t be a U.S. Great Wall expert,” Mr. Hano said.

After a frantic telephone appeal to the Foreign Ministry, the Germans were allowed to do the rest of their live segments for the morning program. “We just wanted to show how beautiful China could be,” Mr. Hano said.

This month, when the final batch of event tickets was released to the public, drawing unruly crowds of tens of thousands of people to the sales offices, police blocked reporters, including Maureen Fan of The Washington Post, from approaching the scene. The official English-language China Daily carried a mystifying after-action story reporting that a photographer for the South China Morning Post had apologized after “breaking through a barricade … and kicking an officer in the groin.”

The China Daily appears to be a different sort of victim of the Olympic reporting climate. In uneventful times, the paper has a quirky, amusingly gothic news sensibility. But under the pressure of the impending Games, it has taken to running headlines such as “Games to Be a Great Success: Survey” or “President Boosts Athletes’ Morale.”

Contemplating a possibly unruly foreign reporting corps, the Chinese so far have embraced control as a bulwark against anarchy. When Korean television filmed a dress rehearsal for the secrecy-shrouded opening ceremony and put it on the Web, the response was stern: The final rehearsal on Aug. 6 would be closed to the press.

“The Koreans spoiled the party for everybody,” Mr. Ruffolo said.

It’s a strange party anyway. Every major, city-occupying news event involves caste and class distinctions that are specific to that city, that event, that year.

In Beijing, you see it in the upscale Taiwanese dumpling house: the pack—six or eight beefy, flushed white men and one beefy black woman—with their yellow Olympic media credentials around their necks.

That the dumpling house is not an Olympic venue is beside the point.

They are here.

Who are you? Domestic or international? Resident bureau correspondent or visitor? News or sports? Print or broadcast? Rights-holding broadcast or non-rights-holder?

Tag wearer or tag shedder? The social overtones are much the same as they are for lift tickets once you’ve departed the slopes. But there is another incentive for reporters to wear the yellow tags outside the sealed Olympic zone—free public transit, free admission to various sites—just as there is incentive for the Chinese to provide incentive for reporters to keep wearing their identifying yellow badges around town.

The yellow badges also demonstrate that you do not have the blue badge. Yellow badges are for the Main Press Center, on the west side of the Olympic Green, a little bit north of the National Aquatics Center and the National Indoor Arena and the Digital Beijing building.

Blue badges are for the Beijing International Media Center, a press center whose main drawback is that it is not, strictly speaking, at the Olympics.

The BIMC is for the Olympic underclass, the journalists and outlets who missed or didn’t qualify for the Main Press Center deadline back in 2006—the quasi-independents, the recently established China desks, the bureau foot soldiers, the just plain disorganized, the supernumerary Chinese media. On the northern arm of Beijing’s central axis, the Olympic Green starts just outside the Fourth Ring Road; the BIMC is out of view, inside the Third Ring. There are people with yellow tags who don’t even know the blue tags exist.

In late July, before the full security lockdown of the Olympic zone, it was still possible—by arguing long enough—for someone registered with the BIMC to get a day pass into the Main Press Center for press briefings. The instructions were to bring a passport and keep the blue tag out of sight. Out on the sidewalk, a staffer handed off a press-conference schedule with a handwritten note in Chinese at the top. The guards yielded at the sight of it.

Inside the gates, paradise is in some ways less plush than purgatory.

The BIMC is in a cushily renovated hotel, with an exterior of bright white paint and blue-tinged frosted glass, with letters and numerals in the world’s various scripts floating on the glass panels. The elevators are so lavishly mirrored, inside and out, that it’s hard to tell when the doors have opened. Outside the biggest press conference hall, a uniformed employee tends a silver dispenser of ice water with lemon in it.

The front end of the MPC, on the other hand, was built to serve as a convention center after the Games: broad concrete hallways, with exposed pipes and ductwork in a black-painted ceiling. Then, right before the largest of the press-conference halls—Hall No. 1, the “Plum Blossom” hall—you cross over into the part of the building that will be the five-star InterContinental Beijing Beichen Hotel after the games. There, off to the right, is a soaring lobby with multistory wall art, and polished surfaces everywhere (except underfoot, where gray industrial carpet awaits a monthlong trampling). The seats in the Plum Blossom hall are red and there are some 800 of them.

“We have 4,000 people working in the building today,” Jeff Ruffolo said on Aug. 5, on a local phone call from the MPC. Counting the broadcast people in their own center, he said, the total was probably more like 10,000.

Mr. Ruffolo, a former Olympic sportscaster, holds the title of senior expert with the Beijing Olympic organizing committee—a position that, by his own account, he badgered the committee into creating for him.

All through the run-up to the Games, his has been the white face that foreign reporters see as they try to get their bearings at the Olympic news briefings. When the Olympic media center split in July into the MPC and the BIMC, Mr. Ruffolo went to the MPC. He had, he said, never been so busy in his life.

“Today, tomorrow are the crunch days,” he said. “We get people that we’ve never seen ever coming to the press conferences and the like by the hundreds.”

Before they get to the MPC press-conference hall, non-Chinese-speaking reporters are asked—to their visible alarm, if it’s their first time—to surrender their yellow credentials as a deposit on a wireless translation receiver and earpiece. The receiver does something for the language barrier, but not everything: In a press conference about forestry, an official answered a question about what trees Beijing had planted by offering a list of tree varieties in Chinese—which came over the earpiece in English reduced to “poplar and other kinds of trees.” The online transcript in Chinese left out the list altogether.

The gesture of providing an answer had been enough.

Another gesture: At the BIMC, in a back hallway of the reception tent, there is a ticketing office. Because the blue credential doesn’t grant access to venues, the idea is to allow BIMC registrants to buy tickets to see events with the general public. Or rather—as it emerged when the office finally opened, after three weeks of delays—to allow each reporter to buy one ticket, for one event, in the course of the whole Olympics. (Three days into the sales, a text message went out saying that the reporters could buy more, three days before an event, if there were leftovers.)

Sometimes, news does emerge at the BIMC. It was there, not at the MPC, that traffic and environmental officials first met the press to discuss the fact that five days after a driving ban on half the city’s private cars, the roads were still jammed and the air was full of smog.

But it was at the MPC that a security briefing included official acknowledgement that the city would be setting up official protest zones in three parks during the Olympics. Reporters huddled up afterward to figure out where the third park, World Park, which nobody had heard of, was located—halfway out to Hebei Province, it turned out. The other two parks weren’t bad, though.

It was the BIMC at which reporters were loaded onto buses for what proved to be a six-hour tour of Olympic food-production facilities. It began with a briefing at the municipal agricultural bureau, in a too-small room. Food-safety briefings are among the worst, because the officials are politically obligated to begin each one by explaining at length that testing has demonstrated that the entire ordinary food supply of Beijing is clean and untainted—after which they explain how a wholly separate food-supply system has been set up to protect athletes from tainted food.

Then the buses set out for the countryside. Beijing has set up reserved lanes on major roads for Olympic vehicles so that they can avoid traffic jams, but the BIMC buses couldn’t drive on them. After nearly two hours on the road, the reporters were delivered to an organic farm in which rows of greenhouses were growing green peppers. Peppers after peppers after peppers after peppers, clear down the row, almost to the end, where a few greenhouses were full of basil. Camera crews swarmed through the doorway to surround a woman in a straw hat, stooped over, snipping basil with scissors. The athletes will have fresh basil.

And China will be covered, whether China or the reporters enjoy it or not. America is pledged to the ideal of a free press, even if Americans don’t always approve of the press itself. The Chinese have not even been taught to love the press in the abstract. China is not even good at pandering to the media—as in its failure to install an uncensored Internet connection at the MPC. For many reporters and editors, their first exposure to the Beijing of 2008 was through registering with an intransigent, nitpicking bureaucracy.

AT A MUCH higher altitude, that bureaucracy has shown itself in the delicate negotiations with NBC, which will broadcast an unprecedented 2,900 hours out of 3,600 possible hours live to American televisions from official Olympic venues.

For 17 days beginning on Aug. 8, NBC’s on-air talent will be taping stand-ups against a narrative backdrop of dirty air, political unrest and press censorship. But the sports—at least, a lot of them, and for most American audiences—will be broadcast live.

As a sporting event, it will be extraordinary. Though there is a Summer Olympics every four years, this year’s edition promises unique drama: China has resolved to mark its turn as host nation by displacing the United States at the top of the gold medal table, and there is every reason to believe they’ll do it.

From the standpoint of great international rivalries, it’s reminiscent of America vs. the Soviet bloc: the superpowers, fighting a proxy battle with javelins and two-man sculls across a massive political and cultural divide.

But these games are also going to provide the American media an opportunity—or an obligation, depending on the business prerogatives of the outlet—to say serious things about serious topics, even at risk of running afoul a host nation with a low level of tolerance for hostile press.

“We pushed hard to send a good number of people to the games,” said New York Times sports editor Tom Jolly, “and it’s about so much more than the sports here.”

“Beijing is treating the Olympics as a showcase of a world power,” Times executive editor Bill Keller wrote in an e-mail to The Observer. “We’re treating it as a showcase for great journalism.”

These Beijing Olympic Games present the sort of dilemma that assignment editors and correspondents wait their whole lives to confront. Eleven thousand athletes; an opening ceremony with 15,000 performers. The new world superpower onstage, open as never before to Western media; 20,000-plus credentialed reporters (according to official reports in China) telling the story.

A massive feat of organization for the Chinese government, for the International Olympic Committee—and for the news agencies that have come to China to cover the Games.

“One day, they’ll e-mail us and ask for certain information, and the next day, after we raised a question as to why, then it changes,” said Mr. Jolly, the Times sports editor. “This is mostly silly stuff—like requests for photos for credentials because there was a blue background instead of a white background. That literally happened. Actually to a few different people. Those sorts of things happened.”

“There’s a combination of the language difficulties and the time difference and the fact that we’re dealing with government that’s not used to press freedoms,” he said.

But on the other hand, there is China’s calculation that certain compromises with Western sensibilities about the media will be necessary if they’re going to get what they need out of these Olympics. It’s a development Joe Kahn, The Times’ deputy foreign editor who won a Pulitzer Prize with Jim Yardley for his coverage of the country, has been watching closely.

“Journalists will write about the beauty of the architecture in Beijing—we’ve had some of that. Obviously, there will be the other side—I don’t think they’re expecting positive coverage. There are enough reporters in Beijing that they will get a mix and on the whole, and China has made the calculation that generally means more good than bad.”

Judging from Mr. Ebersol’s account of his network’s coverage, it’s working.

“China’s new to the world in terms of openness,” he said. “It’s really a whole new thing for them.”

He described a “constant dialogue” between his network and the Chinese government about coverage of the Olympics. (That dialogue is probably helped along by the fact that NBC’s corporate parent, General Electric, is a sponsor of the Olympics, for which it had to pay $900 million for its exclusive American broadcast.)

“We clearly will be able to come out of Tiananmen Square for the Games. I understand with the amount of events, there’s going to be a runaround [concerning] Tiananmen Square, why it’s not going to be available 24 hours a day. The six or seven hours that they’re starting off with right now, it’s a starting point. Would we like more on a whole lot of different levels? Of course we would, but we continue to dialogue with them.”

But which way will that “dialogue” move the counter? On Aug. 5, three days before the Olympics are to start, sports columnist Harvey Araton, who is covering his tenth Olympics, wrote a post on The Times’ Olympics blog.

On his press bus, an official informed his group that a new policy was in place for reporters who wished to conduct interviews on Tiananmen Square.

“Something about a day’s advance notice, an application, a sanctioning office with a fax machine,” he wrote. “Knowing that reporters from the New York Times staff had already visited the Square the last two days and had encountered little difficulty in getting people to talk, I asked how new the policy was: Brand new or created-specifically-for-our-group new.”

The official’s answer: “Two days, I think.”

tscocca@observer.com, jkoblin@observer.com, fgillette@observer.com

I had spent the morning and early afternoon 80-some miles away in Tianjin—the Newark to Beijing’s New York. I had in mind that I would return on the brand-new bullet train, but the bullet train isn’t open to customers yet. Neither is the new Tianjin train station, so I waited in the old one, a vast, grimy shed above the tracks.

It gets easier and easier, if you stay within the busily improving capital, to forget what the ordinary infrastructure of China is like. Hand-painted train-announcement signs and LED ones contradicted each other; information moved through the immense crowd of travelers by word of mouth or herd intuition. The crowd-mind absorbed the news that the 3:46 express to Beijing was delayed 20 minutes … 30 minutes … 10 or 15 minutes more … finally (a surge toward the stairways) boarding.

The train itself was clean and modern and completely sold out. I rode standing up, looking out the window in the train door at the tedious landscape. In America, I usually enjoy the view from trains, of the shacks and junkyards and industrial wreckage of the country’s backside. But China is already one big rail bed; the backside of the country is everywhere. If anything, the railway scenery seemed tidier than average. In the train car, a seated passenger was reading a magazine article with the headline, in English, “Keep Fit While Learning English/Simple Ways to Suppress Your Appetite.”

The Beijing train station had been given over to endlessly repeating lit-up advertising posters of the five Olympic mascots, the Fuwa: Bèibei the fish, Jíngjing the panda, Huànhuan the Olympic flame, Yíngying the Tibetan antelope, and Níni the swallow, the unpopular one. “Beijing Huan Ying Ni”—“Beijing Welcomes You.”

On the Thursday before, the Olympic press center had called a sudden news conference—a “flash”—to announce that the final Olympic subway lines would be opening … soon. Probably before the end of the weekend. As usual, a reporter who was there told me, such specifics as a date or a time went unoffered.

A text message arrived from a friend: The subway was open. Another, from a different friend: The Apple store was open. “People keep pulling the security cord off the laptops, setting off alarms. …”

Downtown, at the Donghuamen night market, I had reporting to do for a food story. On a corner across from the food stalls, a young Chinese woman in a black polo shirt stopped me—could I take a survey? The lanyard around her neck said “Nielsen.” She held up a tiny, featherweight notebook computer. I clicked through the questions. How long had I been in China? (Longer than a year.) Did I recognize the Olympic slogan? (“One World One Dream.”) Did I agree, disagree, or not know whether each part of the three-part Olympic motto was accurate: Green Olympics (agree; for public transit alone), High-Tech Olympics (agree; the surveillance system is astonishing), People Olympics (don’t know). Had I bought any Olympic merchandise? (Yes.)

Did I think that the Olympics would be a success? (Don’t know.)

Whatever may happen in August, tourists were making it to the night market in July, at least. I dined, taking notes as I went, on fried scorpions, fried bees, a fried starfish and a bowl of pork-intestine soup. A culinary-minded Chinese friend helped me with the Mandarin interpretation. The starfish was full of a gummy gray mass like flavorless, overcooked fish eggs, and was so messy to pry open that I gave up after two of the five arms. Everything else was fine.

When we got in a taxi to leave, the cabbie confessed he had no idea how to get from downtown to Dongzhimen, the major junction where I live. He was fresh from the countryside and had been driving a cab for fewer than 10 days. We got him to the Second Ring Road, then gave him a quick tutorial on the layout of the northeast as we went: Chaoyangmen, then Dongsishitiao, and finally Dongzhimen. His driving experience was no more extensive than his geographical knowledge; the cab flinched in and out of lanes. In less than 20 days, Olympic visitors would be trying to hail his taxi.

There was still time to catch a ride on the subway. I took another cab out to the Third Ring, where the new No. 10 line runs, and entered at the Liang Ma Bridge station. The hallways were a tasteful gray, and a breeze was blowing through them. I bought a one-ride card—about 30 cents—and rode one stop to the Sanyuan Bridge station, to see if I could transfer to take the new airport express train home. I could, the station attendant told me, but it would be more than 10 times as expensive—twice as much as a taxi ride. It seemed, in that moment, profligate, even in the name of research. I surfaced and got a cab.

The 20th was hot but clear and clean. The inner driveway of the apartment building was lined with cars, their plates ending in 9 … 3 … 9 … 7 … 5. But in the construction pit across the alley from the living-room window, a crane was still moving.

Toward evening, we went to Sanlitun, the old Embassy-bar street a few blocks east of home. The west side of the street has been redeveloped into a series of shopping complexes. In a white Moorish-style building, we found a new branch of an Asian chain selling Western kitchenware: tri-ply copper-stainless cookware; silicone cake molds and basting brushes; pepper mills; enameled cast-iron casseroles. A year ago, a place like that would have been unimaginable. We have been cooking in Beijing with a hodgepodge of pans and utensils collected from supermarkets, the corner store and parts unknown. In the courtyard outside the kitchen store, Tex-Mex music was blaring from a restaurant with a cactus on the signboard. Workers were finishing store interiors. At the front of the building, signs announced an American Apparel was coming soon.

Further down Sanlitun, at the corner with North Workers’ Stadium Street, was the new Adidas superstore, the world’s largest. Next to it was a nearly finished Uniqlo. The two mark the south end of the Village, a collection of retail buildings drawn up by avant-garde architects, all steel and angled glass walls and gold-tinged materials. Further into the compound was a Nike store, and then the Apple store: an immense glowing white logo on a gray box, two or three stories above an open square—the old Macintosh “1984” commercial perfectly reversed. Inside, a clerk greeted me in English so flawless that I didn’t notice it was English till a second clerk did the same.

It was getting dark. Back outside the Apple store, a billboard-size video screen announced: “The paint is almost dry and the first villagers are moving in.” A slapping sound echoed off the walls. Up on a scaffold, a worker was gluing tall purple letters to the glass, rising from left to right, thumping each one into place with his hands. He was just putting the “n” on “Steve Madden.”

tscocca@observer.com

Ms. Shen spoke English and wore yoga pants, a white T-shirt and flip-flops. (“I do yoga a lot,” she said.) Her hair was reddish and pulled back. Around her, the night was full of women in short-shorts, teetering heels, sparkly things; among the women were all the men looking for women.

Sex and da City opened in 2003, Ms. Shen said. She and about a dozen friends had been out at the World of Suzy Wong Club, and everyone agreed they might as well open a bar of their own. When they convened to discuss the idea again in the daytime, the group had dwindled to five. When it came time to talk about investing money, Ms. Shen said, it was down to four women.

That night, Ms. Shen said, she went home and watched HBO. And right there was a show—she had already been a fan—about “exactly four girls,” pursuing independence and glamour in the big city. Before Ms. Shen and her partners went to the bank, another one of them dropped out, but she had settled on the name. Replacing “the” with “da” is, by Chinese standards, a fairly respectful nod to intellectual-property rights.

“We have Charlotte, we have Carrie,” Ms. Shen said. They have Samantha, too, Ms. Shen added, but their Samantha won’t admit it. Which one is Ms. Shen? “Maybe Carrie,” she said.

Ms. Shen said she is looking forward to the Sex and the City movie. “Maybe my husband already bought the DVD,” she said.

Houhai is a Beijing phenomenon, a quiet area of shoreline devoured in less than a decade by a nightlife land rush. It now has the frantic, eagerly debauched air of a boardwalk during spring break—tinged by the interethnic May-December satisfaction of expats on the make. A vendor sold T-shirts with flickering graphic equalizers on them. Live heavy metal came out of an open bar front; a cover of “Country Roads” from another. Touts trolled the strip murmuring invitations to this or that “lady bar.” “Lady bar, lady bar.”

Ms. Shen was born in Chairman Mao’s Beijing, in Haidian District. “I never imagined that I could open a bar like this,” she said.

Sex and da City is a modest-size club, with a square floor plan and a square bar in the middle, with a two-story mural of Marilyn Monroe looming above the liquor bottles. A DJ booth was playing hip-hop, loudly. Marilyn’s face looks into a three-sided loft, where tables are 500 RMB ($72). The drink menu is long and includes an “Absolut Astronaut Shooter,” a “Sex and da City Absolut Cosmopolitan,” and an “Olympic Cocktail.” The last was orange-ish and fruity, and it came in a big martini glass with a cherry notched onto its rim.

On each side of the bar is a shiny metal pole, running up to the facing of the loft. Around 11 p.m., a young woman in a snug black dress and shiny boots past her knee climbed up on the bar and began dancing around and on the pole. The dancer had a cheery smile and wore square-cut bangs down past her eyebrows. She danced in a matter-of-fact style, wrapping it up by shinning up the pole, as if in gym class, and doing a back bend.

Another dancer, skinnier and in a blousy, shorter dress, took the next shift. Older Chinese men with peasant faces paused outside in the lane, goggling through the clear part of the glass door. Ms. Shen said she added the pole dancers in 2005. “Actually, there is a school, a pole dancers’ school, in Beijing,” she said. Occasionally, she said, the district police come by and tell them to make sure nobody does anything too provocative.

Inside, a Chinese couple in their 20s was having a drink at one of the tables. Jodi Xu, a reporter born in Shanghai, had met me at the club to help with interviews. The man told us that they had come to the club because of the pole dancers. It was the only pole dancing on the whole street, he said. The dancers used to be more sexy, and they had more moves, he said, but the police had made them cut down on the erotic dancing for the Olympics.

The DJ played “Let’s Get It Started,” and people whooped and began to dance. On top of the bar, the woman in the boots—now wearing a blue pleated skirt and a T-shirt reading “ALL GOOD IN THE HOOD”—kept moving at her previous calm pace.

Up in the loft, by the top of the stairs, the other dancer was slouched in a chair, wearing earbuds. She took them out to talk to us about Sex and da City. She came to Beijing from Shanxi Province two years ago, she said, and she had been an instructor at the city’s pole-dancing school. She dances 10 minutes a shift—she held up her index fingers to make a cross, the Chinese symbol for “10”—eight shifts a night, till 1 a.m. “I studied dancing since I was a child, so that’s why I like dancing,” she said. “But at the same time, I need to make money.” Living in Beijing, she said, created a lot of pressure. “If there’s no money, you can’t survive, and it’s hard to find a job.”

She confirmed that the police had asked them to dance less sexily, more low-key. She fiddled with a cigarette lighter in one hand and a shiny cell phone in the other as she talked. How old was she? Twenty-seven, she said. “Don’t ask about my age.”

Downstairs at the center of the bar, a Chinese woman in a dull-patterned dress had been sitting for a long time with her back to the door, talking to no one, stooped over a lowball glass. A bartender set a bottle of Corona beer, with a lime in the neck, beside her. Then he put fresh ice in a glass and poured the beer over it for her.

tscocca@observer.com

This was my second trip to the stadium. I had been reading (and writing) about it from various distances for the past few years, watching the gleaming avant-garde structure gradually rising and being knitted together at the south end of the Olympic green: “a lattice of interwoven steel” (The New York Times); ”a tangle of steel trusses” (The Times); “mesmeric steel frame” (The Guardian); “monumental steel thatching” (me). Describing the building was like reviewing restaurants and groping for new ways to say “tasty”—it’s a bird’s nest. Made of metal. The end.

The edge of the column I was looking at had been chipped by some passing object. Below the silver surface, a dark gray was showing. I pressed my fingertip into the chipped part. When I pulled it back, there was concrete dust on it.

This was what I had been worrying about since my first visit, in April. The Bird’s Nest had been the last of the Olympic arenas to open to the public. One by one, over the passing months, the other venues had already hosted test events—archery, wrestling, ping-pong, rhythmic gymnastics. The stadium was at the end of the test schedule, with an April race-walking competition, followed by a full track-and-field open in May.

Tens of thousands of people, a sellout crowd, turned out on a sweltering Friday morning to see the race-walkers—that is, to be the first spectators in the building. Approaching it, my feet briefly lost contact with my brain as I tipped my head back to take in the looming, bellying curve. So this is was the Nest.

Somebody won the walking race. I wandered the concourse, taking in the futuristic details: the deep-red paint job on the seating bowl; the translucent, alien-looking hanging light fixtures; the glossy black-painted restrooms; the oddly cartoonish signs and logos, like something drawn up by A Bathing Ape. And everywhere, veering off and coming together at different angles, those huge columns. I walked up to one and touched it, then tapped its surface with my knuckles. It had made a dull, stifled tap.

Tap? I kept mulling over the sound and feeling, in confusion. I’m not a metallurgist or a structural engineer, but it felt as if I had knocked my fist against a big chunk of concrete. Not steel. Or not what I would have expected steel to feel like. But what did I know?

Reporting in China, I find myself constantly groping along through an epistemological fog. Language is part of it (and a big part, in my case, without question), but there is something more fundamentally elusive and opaque about fact-gathering here. People and institutions are not used to the experience of being reported on. It’s not merely that they may be secretive or uncooperative or obstructionist, unprepared for the glaring light of a truly free and inquisitive press, and so on. It’s that even people who want to cooperate—who may even be affirmatively trying to put out a news story—don’t quite know how to distill and transmit information.

Last month, for one example, the Beijing Olympic organizing committee invited the press to meet the director of its project-management department. A handout explained in English that the director’s duties were to “provide services for … decision-making,” “coordinate the compilation of overall operational plans,” and “carry out research … on leading subjects” and “frame preparation policies.”

What followed, after a long opening silence, was the reporters asking, re-asking, and finally badgering and pleading with the guest of honor to explain, with one or two specifics, what sort of things he actually had decided or coordinated or prepared. (“First,” the director replied, after a particularly desperate entreaty, “I would like to say a few words about project management.”)

Usually, reporting in America, when you ask more and more sources about the same topic, their answers begin to converge—the point of convergence is what reporters and their editors think of as a fact. It doesn’t always get to the truth (as in the invasion of Iraq), but the basic method will carry you from the first line of a story to the last.

That sort of focus is more elusive here. Figures and facts drift in and out of view, depending on who’s giving them and who’s asking and who has the final say. Sometimes the best you can do is say what it was that official news reports said. A two-week cutback on driving private cars becomes a four-day cutback. A comprehensive citywide smoking ban, when it went into effect, turns out to allow smoking in restaurants, clubs, Internet cafes and sundry other places.

At one point last year, I read that an official had told a press conference that China had no plans to modify the weather during the Olympics. By that time, I had already interviewed the head of the Weather Modification Office, been briefed on the three-banded layout of the Olympic rain-prevention perimeter, and visited an emplacement of cloud-seeding guns. Sometimes you more or less do know what you know.

But there I was, underneath the Bird’s Nest, with the weight of the whole edifice hanging over me. I had come there, in the deserted afternoon between track-and-field sessions, for a seminar on Olympic reporting, to be held in the press-conference hall. This was yet another inoperative piece of information, a red herring, a wild goose: The room was vacant and undisturbed—almost sterile—rows of white plastic seats under blue-tinged lights, flanked by coolers with every shelf full of untouched water bottles.

Out in the hall, by the columns, a stray venue volunteer suggested that maybe the session would start in half an hour. (It would not.) She went to check on it.

And then I took a look at the column, and the chip out of it. Does steel chip? And there was my left index finger, now with concrete dust on it.

I began to review in my mind a rough list I had been making since the first tap on the pillar in April, the list of all the editors to whom I might now owe a correction. Due to a reporting error …? Due to impenetrable confusion about stadium-engineering techniques …? Due to the fundamental unreliability of received information …?

But what would the substance of the correction be? I am truly, truly not a structural engineer. My knowledge extended only an eighth of an inch below the surface. Maybe there was steel below the concrete. Maybe there was more concrete below the steel below the concrete. After more than two years of reporting on the Beijing Olympics, I had no idea what the National Stadium was made of.

The reporting seminar had been canceled due to lack of interest. I went home and rummaged through my notes. Deep in my clip file, I found an official story from Xinhua, the government news agency, in English. Possibly it was a rewrite or translation by the Olympic organizing committee. It was an interview with Li Jiulun, identified as the “chief engineer” of the Bird’s Nest. It described how Mr. Li and his colleagues had “stuffed the steel tubes with concrete bars” and “poured concrete into the tubes from underneath to custom-make over 1,300 concrete columns and trusses” (“which are three times as efficient as those made through foreign methods”). When I was done reading it, I had even less of an idea of how the stadium had been built.

An e-mail to the Arup engineering firm, one of three companies that worked on the stadium design, went unanswered. I went b
ack to the stadium to cover the track-and-field competition. Liu Xiang, the Olympic 110-meter hurdles champion and world record holder—possibly the most popular athlete in China, even beyond Yao Ming—had showed up to lend his star power to the event, against a field largely made up of provincial runners. In his qualifying semifinal, the race was over by the time he reached the third hurdle. I pestered other reporters, face to face and by SMS: What do you think the stadium is made out of? I think the whole surface is concrete! Does anybody know?

Liu won the hurdles final the next night, again with ease. Stadium volunteers formed a barricade to keep the crowd away, then scurried after him down the hallway themselves. His press conference was scheduled for the very end of the evening.

While I was waiting, my phone buzzed with a text message from another reporter: “A3. Exit. Architect. Now!” I hustled around the concourse to find J Parrish, the architectural director of Arup Sport. He was tall and bearded and loquacious. According to his business card, the J has no period after it. He was politely telling a radio reporter that he had no idea what the opening ceremonies might involve.

What, I asked, apologetically, were the columns made of? Parrish looked around us. “Concrete,” he said, indicating the nearest one, and continuing on: “Concrete, concrete, concrete … steel.”

I double-checked: steel? The outermost layer of columns in the Nest, the key to the structure, were indeed steel, he said. Steel boxes, in cross section, of various thicknesses. The thicket of columns on the inside, crisscrossing the concourses, were concrete, mostly. All the columns were painted silver, to match.

You might need to hit them with a hammer, Mr. Parrish said, to tell the difference.

Mr. Liu gave his press conference. Who, a perky male reporter with an American accent asked, would he describe as his role model? “Zhende hai meiyou,” Liu said, beginning his response. (“I don’t have any particular role model or idols,” the official translator said.)

It was near midnight when I exited the stadium. I had a long hike ahead to get a cab. First, though, I veered back to the outer row of columns, and I knocked on one, with force. It rang.

tscocca@observer.com