June 15, 2007. There we are, finally. After over 3 years of hard work, patience, despair and enthusiasm we organized the “Signing of the first piece of the Athletes Alley”, in the BOCOG Exhibition Hall. The VIPs who left their marks were HRH Prince Philippe (Crown Prince of Belgium), Mr. Wang Wei (BOCOG Executive Vice President & Secretary General) and the Belgian artist Olivier Strebelle. Later on their signature will be engraved. The piece is part of the first sculpture element.

The Association “Strebelle in Beijing 2008” is donating the art work to the Beijing Government, in the name of the Belgian Government (through the National Lottery) and several enterprises such as Belgacom, Suez Tractebel, Inbev, Janssen Pharmaceutica, CMB, Euronav, Total, Baron Vastapane.
The board of directors of the Association includes François Narmon (Dexia Bank), Jean-Luc Dehaene (former Belgian prime minister), Etienne Davignon (Suez Tractebel), Luc Vansteenkiste (Recticel), Alain Rens (former ambassador), Pierre Jean Everaert (InBev), Gad Weil (project director).

Location of the sculpture: in the Olympic Park, close to the main western entrance and north of the International Area and the Olympic Village (Olympic Green).
Five groups of abstract sculptures made of stainless steel tubes are spread over an area of 100 meters long and 20 meters wide. The average height is 14.5 meters and the highest point is 20 m.
From a precise point of view at the entry of the alley, the abstract elements become a figurative ensemble revealing the logo of the Olympic Games, held up by five athletes.

the Strebelle team in Brussels working on one of the many scale models – Sun & Gilbert – the whole Strebelle team

BOCOG launched a “new version” of their website. To put it mildly, it sucks. Can’t they really find any better designers?
The list of complaints is so long I won’t try to give an overview. Follow some anyway.
It starts with the home page. Sorry people but here we use Celsius and not this F stuff for temperature. You can’t even chose to go metric – OK for me to have an option F for the USA, why not.
If you use a MAC, well, forget it. To download their brochure (suddenly they seem to have one!) you stumble on an .exe file. Did they ever hear about a PDF?
After you login, well, you are not “logged in” and you can’t “log out”.
And their search is totally useless, at least in English. A friend sent me the comment that our Olivier Strebelle project was featured on the website (more about that later, hold on). Tough luck, nowhere to be found in the English section and no result with search.
Their electronic map: as I said to Capinfo and others in the past, their weak point is they don’t have any system to update information on the city. The maps are unreliable and wrong at times. I only checked my area – Gongti. I guess you have to pay them to get the right info mentioned? For reliable information, better go to “That’s Beijing”.
Hopeless really. I did fill out their questionnaire.

I just gave a 2 hours lecture for Beijing University, Guanghua School of Management, for a UK program of top business executives – 6 June. Small team but very interactive, they seemed much awake and had a good laugh with my (irreverent) insight in the Beijing Olympics, Chinese attitudes and doing business in China.

Another recent (and rather long) seminar was done for a large EMBA delegation, on 10 May, in News Plaza Hotel. This time, from the IPADE Business School – Mexico. Another enthusiastic group.

As I mention in my seminars, there’s a lot of wrong information in the press. Part is due to the poor PR of the Beijing officials.
The latest excess is from the Geneva-based “Center on Housing Rights and Evictions”, a so-called “rights group”. They just came up with this nonsense:
“It is shocking and entirely unacceptable that 1.25 million people have already been displaced in Beijing, in preparation for the 2008 Games, in flagrant violation of their right to adequate housing” (they expect it to climb to 1.5 million!).
In what planet are those people living? Do they even know where is Beijing? Well, explains a lot. Now I know why Beijing is becoming so empty, hahaha. Or do they include all the people who have been (happily) house hopping?
They better come and listen to my seminars. I am not exactly sugar-coating 2008 (to put it mildly) and that topic is addressed in my overview – including the Dongsi Batiao Hutong story. Oh yes, if they want to listen to me, I do charge MONEY. I am a real capitalist, sorry for that, nobody is perfect.

Let’s be happy with our Beijing 2008 logo. London has its own and, oh boy, do I agree with the critics. Looks like 9.11 for me. Kaboom, Pieces shattered everywhere, they dropped the cute porcelain plate.

Couldn’t they find anything more appealing? And don’t even mention how much that has cost. Hey, Beijing is not that bad, isn’t it?

Of course still better than the above (really?), if, I said if, you can spot the difference. Don’t ask me where I got that one, call it client-attorney-privilege something.