So, from a city where even the buildings seem to claw at the sky for air, the din of Olympia rises.

In a forgetful world, the Games make perfect sense. For 17 days, they flood the corners of the globe with stories of grace, piety, fraud, idealism and, on occasion, epic gall. They fool and dwarf and enchant us. They manipulate people, selling political systems as blithely as a can of Coke.

The naked giganticism offends some. The folksy symbolism induces nausea. So, too, the babel of corporate 'partners', the suited cronies. But, then, the lights go on and we excuse ourselves, pulling the sheets up, lighting a cigarette.

And, if we've seen grisly things in that time like male sprinters with yellow eyes running faster than jet-skis, or female Amazons fork-lifting epic weights, we just step in the shower and hose our discomfort down the plumbing. And, for the next 1,443 days, we forget them.

Cynicism

Cynicism contaminates every Olympics now. Beijing has simply brought that cynicism to a different place.

Every host city picks some kind of fight with its own people. People get exploited, displaced, over-run. The Russians cleansed Moscow of dissidents in 1980. Los Angeles cleared its homeless off the streets in '84. In '88, the Korean police tried (and failed) to sanitise Seoul. Barcelona's gypsies; Atlanta's poor; Sydney's aboriginals; they all found Olympic town a hostile, low- tolerance place.

Atlanta actually took the biscuit. It painted the slums in gentle, scatter-cushion colours and built a municipal jail as its first Olympic facility.

So if you want to put your hand up about any bad stuff going on with flecks of Chinese DNA on it in Darfur, Burma, Tibet, wherever, just be aware that you're beating an old drum about the cords connecting an Olympic Games with the suppression of human rights.

True, China has graver questions than most to answer. And the wild electrics of yesterday's extraordinary Opening Ceremony boomed out, fundamentally, as a legitimising opera for the hosts. But symbolism has always subsumed morality at an Olympics.

Remember how the Mexico Games went imperviously ahead despite the massacre of 400 students; how, four years later, Munich still flashed the lights even after the kidnapped Israeli athletes died.

China gets these Games because size matters. Because it has 1.3 billion people and that's the kind of market that spills dribble down the chins of the IOC's commercial 'partners'. China is an oil well and the Olympic family answers to the name of Ewing.

The marriage of a country this size with double-digit rates of economic growth and a billion-dollar international franchise may, then, have an arranged feel to it. But to deny the union would be to back away from a great mountain of dollars. And big-business does not do that.

So the athletes of the world assemble in a city where the air is dirty. No matter. In the big picture, they are bit- players in this ceremony. And, to be fair, the venues and organisation of these Games already look certain to draw that old Samaranch line "Best Games Ever" from IOC boss, Jacques Rogge, when business concludes 15 days from now.

Rogge has described the Beijing smog as "more like steam" and it will take only one blue day this coming fortnight for the cameras to nail sufficient images of the architectural confectionery to baptise Beijing '08 an aesthetic wonder.

The bottom line is that more than half of the IOC's budget comes from America. And China, the world's largest consumer, controls the dollar. This had to happen.

The Games themselves will unspool in two parallel worlds. Light and shade. There is still room at an Olympics for the honest Corinthian, the idealist, the honest obsessive. Just as there is, of course, for the cheat willing to throw dice.

More people run clean now than maybe have done in 30 years. Most of the womens' Track and Field world records survive from the discredited era of Flo Jo, Marita Koch, Petra Felke and, more recently, Ma Junren's robotic army. Of the two fastest women of all time, one (Flo Jo) is dead, the other (Marion Jones) rots in a US prison.

The men's race keeps on quickening with the same old, endless worries. The muscle men sprint faster than ever; the waifs run long distance with implausibly light feet. All can trace a genetic line down the Horn of Africa.

Coming from Ireland, with its parsimonious sports investment and franchise on busted stadium dreams, Beijing pretty much feels like another planet.

We have a team of 54 athletes here and, given the grotesque importance attached to success, some of them will get burned by the experience. That's a pity because they have earned their places here, and they represent the best of us.

Preparation is better than it was, but there remains a battle for territory between the funding parties that guarantees nothing but a subjective postmortem. Expect it to be noisy.

Who knows, the boxers might filch a medal. If so, at least, we can be confident it won't re-possessed by the drugs police.

But the tone of these Games will be set tomorrow in the basketball arena when China and America shoot the hoops in a contest that promises to electrify Beijing.

Ordinarily, the US take a proprietorial approach to this particular gig, but a mere bronze for the 'Dream Team' in Athens introduced them to the quaint concept of humility.

So they come here with NBA stars like Kobe Bryant and Lebron James knowing that nothing is written in stone. Yao Ming, the immense giant who carried the Chinese flag at the Opening Ceremony, plays for the Houston Rockets and might yet be the face of these Games.

If not, it could be the 110 metre hurler, Liu Xiang, whose victory in Athens turned him into a cash cow for Nike, Visa and Coca-Cola among others. China can be expected to stockpile medals here, but some will have a weight beyond others.

If Liu sees off the brewing challenge of Cuban Dayron Robles, he could blow the fuses in the Bird's Nest.

Pursuit

China is consumed with a desire to top the medals chart and the single, most challenging obstacle they face in that pursuit is Michael Phelps. He will go to war with history, wearing Speedo's new LZR full-body swimsuit that has already become de rigeur on the pool-deck.

Part of the same cast will be a 41-year-old mom, Dara Torres, trying to convince the world that she's not a pharmacist's swindle.

The sight of millionaire footballers like Ronaldinho and Lionel Messi and tennis gods like Roger Federer and Rafa Nadal will thrill on one hand, draw the measured pieties of romantics on the other.

The great encyclopedia of Olympic drugs scandals will gather pages. Alibis will tickle. From Ben Johnson's sarsaparilla to Linford Christie's ginseng tea, to Justin Gatlin, to Kelli White and her family history of narcolepsy, to the whole BALCO shop of horrors, the tradition is in place for another grisly soap.

The Olympics will celebrate excess and vanity and opportunism every bit as zealously as human courage. They will chafe around the edges. But it's probably better, for all the deceit and profiteering, that they happen.

If you watched Ciara Peelo carry the Irish flag, you were looking at a pretty good reason.

You see, there will still be beautiful stories told here because there are still athletes chasing the same things chased by Tisdall and Delany, by Coghlan, Treacy, Carruth and Sonia.

And the Chinese people will be wonderful, proud, welcoming hosts. They poured into Tiananmen Square yest-erday, a great, red sea un-dammed after years of hidden struggle. True, they did so under the rigorous gaze of police who probably have blood on their hands.

True, too, the images from the days ahead will ache with jingoism and propaganda from a square known to us previously as a place of gruesome massacre.

It's more than 30 years since the last truly statesman-like president of the IOC, Lord Killanin, warned: "I appeal to every single sportsman not to come to the Olympic Games for political purposes or commercial exploitation. If this is not accomplished, then the Olympic movement and all sport is doomed.

"We shall retreat into barbarism."

Innocent words? Prophetic maybe? The Communists have bankrolled €25bn for this show at a time when they veto sanctions against Zimbabwe and try to abort action in the International Criminal Court against Sudan's president.

So it's not the Disney fairytale you saw come rolling up out of the Bird's Nest yesterday. And China, for all the smiles, is not the docile uncle it would like the West to believe. But Beijing '08, at least, shines a light.

The first "green" Olympics they call these, in a city quite literally wheezing for air. Irony lost in the branding. Let the Games begin.

- Vincent Hogan