Following up on Tuesday's post, and at the risk of temporarily turning this into a sports blog, an interesting article from a Seattle Post-Intelligencer on why the planned NFL game in China got the -ahem- punt. Among other things, the original idea was for the game to played in the not-ready-for-prime-time Bird's Nest:

The chief hang-up was an obvious one: The new stadium isn't close to being ready.

Called the "Bird's Nest" for its wild exterior latticework of exposed steel girders, the stadium won't be completed until March, seven months after the proposed football game.

Talk about poor clock management.

"According to our schedule, all the venues for the Games will be completed by the end of this year, except the national stadium," Wu Jingjuan, spokesman for the 2008 construction office, told reporters at a news conference in Beijing last month marking 500 days until the Olympics. "The National Stadium will be handed over in time for the first test event scheduled in April."

But Leiweke said it was his understanding that the game was destined for Workers Stadium, a smaller, drabby 1959 edifice being tricked up to host Olympic soccer. If true, that may not have pleased NBC, which hoped to make the Bird's Nest its visual icon for subsequent promotion.

For a Seattle analogy, it sounds a bit as if a European soccer powerhouse was booked for a friendly at Qwest Field, only to be told the game would be held at high school Memorial Stadium.

How this misunderstanding happened isn't clear. But one sports executive who has done work with Chinese Olympic personnel said, "The NFL didn't have a good relationship with the Beijing (Olympic) organizing committee."

Whatever delayed the stadium completion, it seems likely that, given the volume of Olympic prep to be done, the Chinese had no time for the NFL sideshow.
Ahh, China. Still, it saddens me to see the Workers' Stadium treated so shabbily. After all, I grew up watching football games at shambolic Candlestick Park (AKA 3Com Park, AKA Monster Park). The Workers' Stadium, which is of about the same vintage, can't be any worse.