Page 23 - Unlikely Stories 2

Asian Games

me. He grabbed my arm and pulled me away from the scene—I
didn’t protest, still in a daze.
I got back to the press room and looked at the official results. The
Africans were first, second and third. I asked about the Tibetan-
Chinese runner, and got blank stares. The Chinese had finished well
behind the winners. It made no sense to me: the athlete I’d witnessed
would have overtaken the leaders well before the entrance to the
stadium. I questioned one of the other American reporters who’d
been on Beichen Road, halfway to the stadium. He looked at me like
I was crazy when I told him what I’d seen. The next day I went back
to where I had been standing. Like every other street in the city
during the Olympics, it had been scrubbed clean; no sign that a foot
race had occurred there the day before, much less an eye-popping
display of superhuman speed. Had I hallucinated the whole thing?
Yeah, well, that was a rhetorical question, buddy. Anyway, when I
looked again at the marathon results, I found that only two Chinese
runners were listed as finishing the race, but three had started.
Nobody else seemed to care about that discrepancy. When I asked if
I could interview that pair, I was told that they had already returned
to their home towns and were unavailable. Then I asked if anyone
had pictures of the Chinese runners taken during the first half of the
race. None of the foreign correspondents did, so I sent a request to
the IOC press officer. Instead of a photograph, I got an invitation to
meet the head man, Avery Whiteman. That’s right, the old guy who
just about created the modern Olympic Games and ruled them with
an iron fist. He didn’t want to talk in his office, so we took a walk out
in a park nearby. None of the Chinese recognized him.
I told him that I had seen something very strange involving the
host country’s marathon runners. He didn’t want to hear any more
about it. Instead he swore me to secrecy, a tough thing for a reporter
to swallow, but we have to protect our sources to stay in business!
Then he told me that he had been requested to cover up an
embarrassing incident during the race in order to keep China a
contented member of the Olympics community of nations. A high
official in their national committee had informed him that an
American might have witnessed it, but would have been the only

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