主题：唠唠奥运吧 -- 踢细胞

Yesterday I saw two human beings from China come within easy hailing distance of perfection and for me, as for them, it was a thing of joy.

...

They showed us the game face, the face of stone throughout the brief moments of the competition, but after their final dive the sun came from behind the clouds and they exchanged victors' smiles that were like solar flares.

...

Wu Minxia and He Zi, and they were competing in a different dimension. ...The Chinese have taken a sport into undreamt of places and the world shows no sign of catching up.

These days I never feel the Olympic Games have begun until I have seen Chinese divers at work; until I have had a small feast of their lonely excellence. The thing that impresses me when watching them is the way that, again and again and (impossibly) again, they are able to bring the best of the practice pool into competition.

That's why we like to call them machines of course. It's as if they don't have nerves like the rest of us, as if they are remote-controlled toys rather than flesh and blood. And if that intimidates the opposition, they are not above exploiting it. But joy in victory is something that humanises and tells the true story.

It's not that they don't feel nerves; it's more that they are eerily brilliant at controlling them, at not letting nerves affect performance the wrong way.

Most individual divers have dives that they think they can nail and dives that they hope they can nail. Wu and He restricted themselves to dives they knew they could nail, dives they can do ten times in ten attempts. The same dives are eights and nines even for the best of the rest.

...

It was as if every other team in the competition dived into water while Wu and He dived into a vat of molasses.

It's a baffling and slightly alienating degree of excellence, and one that we in Britain, in this hemisphere, find difficult to deal with. Sport on this level requires more than most people are prepared to give, and the question of the degree of willingness with which it is given is one that rightly disturbs us.

But the public part of all elite sports conceals matters that would make the most robust of us feel squeamish. Excellence is a difficult and frightening concept. People who don't like it are free to pick something their own size. Yesterday the Chinese view of excellence brought us an afternoon of wonder and privilege.

This is the sort of thing that the Olympic Games are for; the reason why the world's eyes are on London.