BEIJING — Hello world, this is also the Smile Olympics where you get the finest toothpaste-ad grin from all medal winners.
The motto, you’re right, is not faster, higher stronger.
It’s wider, bigger, sweeter.
You’re on candid camera.
Say “cheese” or “Tuesday.”
Take your pick of the purest, most honest set of gleaming front teeth in the Olympics.
My money goes to the tiny Deng Linlin, the winged China doll who shone in her squad’s gold medal win in gymnastics team competitions for women.
Hers is the perfect smile of an angelic winner.
* * *
OK, all of them in her intrepid team performed like water sprites, flying and flipping limbless in a dream.
But it was sweet Linlin who led this reporter to suspect she was born at a rare moment when the bone disease called arthritis was still totally unknown to the medicine world.
Or doctors may have secretly inserted gold rubber bands that lent magic to her limbs while she was still in the delivery room.
As for Linlin’s golden smile, it’s as flower-fresh as that morning greeting from Beijing 18 years ago, during the 1990 Asian Games, when this capital was still unharmed by progress and wore the morning face of a sinless little girl.
* * *
Anyway, sorry if those pre-Olympics weather reports by CNN had led you to shy away from booming Beijing.
Yes, there’s the intermittent haze but this readily disappears after a downpour.
Most foreign networks, led by CNN, were wrong in alleging this weather phenomenon could be the feared pollution that had allegedly loomed all over this capital in the months leading to the Olympic opening.
Summer here is hot and humid and Beijing, weather-wise, may not be at its finest.
But the air is fine and clean, healthy to breathe, the momentary foggy conditions being caused by anything but the dreaded mix of chemicals in the atmosphere.
In fact, records are being broken, more expected to be ripped following yesterday’s start of competitions in centerpiece athletics.
* * *
That same enigmatic haze must’ve loomed thick enough to lead the chief handler of Harry Tañamor, the lone Filipino boxing entry, to warn him against staying outdoors upon touching down here.
Manny Lopez, head of the Amateur Boxing Association of the Philippines, told Tañamor never to gamble on what he had perceived was a polluted atmosphere.
This is being reported the morning after Tañamor’s disastrous loss to a Ghanian light-flyweight in his opening bout Wednesday.
Sorry to say this, but Tañamor hardly put up a decent fight.
He boxed as though he had indeed been a victim of either food or atmospheric poisoning.
* * *
Tañamor, who had to drastically shed weight, did loom drained, skeletal.
He was fireless, dry as a twig at the height of action.
He also had to frantically resort to unclear body blows, the same limp punches which failed to earn points in his quarterfinal fight in the 2004 Athens Olympics.
Something indeed must’ve gone wrong with Tañamor who, after being recycled following that setback in Athens, vowed victory goaded by tremendous support from generous sponsors that was headed by Smart and which included poor, hungry taxpayers.
Despite claims that he already knew his opponents better, Tañamor lost clear and simple.
Lopez next accepted defeat, telling media people they lost to a better fighter.
* * *
Well and fine, but Tañamor, in the process, also gave losing a new twist and meaning.
He flashed the smile of a victor as he grinned from ear to ear in making a cocky exit.
Philippine Daily Inquirer sports editor Teddy Melendres, who saw it all, found Tañamor’s post-fight reaction intriguing, if not outright repulsive.
It must’ve been the first scene of its sordid sort in Olympic boxing.
False as it was, this same smile could give China’s golden doll Deng Linlin a run for her money in the unofficial Beijing Smile Olympics.
Truth is that Tañamor, with that doggone gesture, had succeeded in turning his disastrous defeat into an anomaly.
How, for example, are they to deny that Tañamor is the masterpiece of an amateur boxing program that has turned mediocrity into an art?
