<small id="day_27" class="post-date2">May 27, 2008, 12:29 pm</small> The Starting Line: Smog in Beijing and a London Stadium to Take Away
By Jeff Z. Klein
A bicyclist in Beijing during today’s pollution alert. (Associated Press/Robert F. Bukaty)
With Beijing’s air quality plummeting because of a sandstorm blowing in today from Mongolia, the municipal government has declared an air quality emergency and advised people with respiratory problems to stay indoors. (The Beijing Municipal Environmental Protection Bureau’s Chinese-language site is here, and translated into English here and is here.)
Today’s confluence of weather conditions and the usual high concentrations of particulates in the air over the capital is exactly the scenario that many feared could mar the Beijing Games. Concerns over air quality are strong enough to have actually persuaded at least one Olympic gold medalist to forgo a Beijing event: Haile Gebrselassie of Ethiopia, who won the 10,000-meter at both Atlanta 1996 and Sydney 2000 as well as many world championship titles at that distance, and who in recent years has taken up marathoning, winning at Berlin last year and holding the unofficial world record time for the distance.
