Yahoo! Photo

Just hours before Olympic gold medalist and outspoken Darfur activist, Joey Cheek, was set to fly to China for the Smoglympics, he received a call from Chinese Embassy official telling him that he couldn’t go, his visa had been denied. The Olympic games are anything but apolitical this time around it seems. The Chinese government offered no explanation and doesn’t necessarily need a reason to deny anyone a visa but this time the reasons to deny 29-year old, Joey Cheek seemed all too obvious.

At the press conference after winning the gold in the 500 meter speedskating in Turin, Italy Joey Cheek announced that he would be donating all $25,000 of his USOC gold and $15,000 silver award money to the Right to Play organization, which is an international humanitarian organization that “uses sport and play as a tool for the development of children and youth in the most disadvantaged areas of the world”, according to the organizations site.

He also challenged his sponsors to match his donations and so far, Jet Set, Roots, Nike and Gap have done so. Cheek admitted that the money wasn’t very much but he has a goal of seeing the program take root in the devastated Darfur region of Sudan where 200,000 people have been killed and 2.5 million displaced since ethnic African tribesmen took up arms in 2003. Joey is also the founder of Team Darfur, a group of 70 athletes who work to raise global awareness of the human-rights violations taking part in the Darfur region of Sudan where China has military, economic and diplomatic ties. Though Joey Cheek was not going to compete in the Olympics he wanted to bring attention the genocide in Darfur, which critics say Beijing abets through its ties to the Sudan government. (WSJ Article)

According to Eddie Pells of the AP - “One of Cheek’s key initiatives was urging the international community to persuade Sudan to observe the ancient tradition of the Olympic truce during the Beijing Games.”

Of the denial of his visa Joey Cheek said –

“I am saddened not to be able to attend the Games. The Olympic Games represent something powerful: that people can come together from around the world and do things that no one thought were possible. However, the denial of my visa is a part of a systemic effort by the Chinese government to coerce and threaten athletes who are speaking out on behalf of the innocent people of Darfur.”

Chris Chase of Yahoo! wrote

“With the Games getting closer (just two days away now), the world seemed ready to forget about all the Chinese issues in order to focus on the Games themselves. Unfortunately, China’s actions make that impossible. In a time when we should be wondering who will light the Olympic cauldron, whether Michael Phelps can break an all-time record and how Liu Xiang will react to the pressure of 1.3 billion of his countrymen hanging on his every step, we’re instead left to discuss the Chinese government’s reluctance to allow any dissension in their country, despite repeated promises that they’d clean up their act when the Olympics came to town.”

According to an AP article, Joey Cheek had not planned on any Team Darfur events but was planning on attending a United Nations Olympic Celebration and some charity events.

“Of course I would have liked to have been there, advocating for a peaceful resolution,” he said. “But we’ll figure something out.”

The Power of One - Joey Cheek

2006 - Harvard Denies Joey Cheek Admission

The green stuff is algae. Apparently the coastline of the city of Qingdao, China has had an enormous algae bloom. According to several articles online (International Herald Tribune, GreenDaily) City officials have rounded up some 20,000 people to come and clean it up by mid-July.

Why the rush?

In six weeks this same coast plans to play host to the Olympic Sailing Regatta and a local news agency, Xinhua, has reported that the algae covers one-third of the coastal waters designated for the Olympic events.

Officials in Qingdao say that pollution and poor water quality have no “substantial link” to the current outbreak and place the blame on increased rainfall and warmer waters in the Yellow Sea. According to the International Herald Tribune,

“Water quality has been a concern for the sailing events, given that many coastal Chinese cities dump untreated sewage into the sea. At the same time, rivers and tributaries emptying into coastal waters are often contaminated with high levels of nitrates from agricultural and industrial runoff.”

Check out our previous article about the “Smoglympics”

Sattler Eco & Fair Labor Clothing

http://www.sattlerclothing.com 

The Smoglympics

According to an article in the washingtonpost.com, recent measurements show that on some days the amount of smoke and dust particles in the Beijing air exceeds, by 3 to 12 times, the maximum deemed safe by the World Health Orgnization. David Martin, a respiratory expert who is helping train U.S. marathoners said, “The magnitude of the pollution in Beijing is not something we know how to deal with. It’s a foreign environment. It’s like feeding an athlete poison.” Typically athletes arrive at least 10 days prior to the event to allow them to acclimate but this year many of the 10,000 Olympians scheduled to descend on Beijing will show up just 72 hours prior to their event.

How bad is it?

“Jeremy Horgan-Kobelski, a Boulder, Colo., bicyclist who competed in the 2004 Olympics in Athens and is a contender for a spot on this year’s U.S. mountain biking team, said that when he arrived in the Chinese capital, the sky was a crystal-clear blue and he thought that concerns about pollution had been overblown. But on the day he was to race, he said, the smog was so thick “you could barely see a few city blocks” from his hotel window.

About 20 minutes into the race, Horgan-Kobelski started having trouble breathing.

“I struggled with it for a while,” he said in a phone interview. “You’re breathing as hard as you can but you feel like your muscles don’t want to work. You’re filling your lungs but you don’t know what’s going in there.”

About halfway through the roughly 30-mile race, Horgan-Kobelski said, “my body sort of shut down.” He pulled over and vomited.

It wasn’t until he got to the athletes’ lounge that he learned that he wasn’t unique. Only eight of 47 contestants in the men’s race finished; the others, including the Chinese riders, also suffered from breathing problems and dropped out.”

According to the article, Beijing officials are not oblivious to the problem and have spent upwards of $16.4 billion moving the heaviest polluters out of the city, planting trees, rerouting traffic and inducing rain. The Chinese government is even considering closing factories and banning cars during the Olympics, an option that local business aren’t real keen to warning of devastating economic consequences. The photo above was posted by rytc on flickr with the description “The smog was unbelieveable in Beijing. The grey here is not rain or cloud, but thick smelly smog. The stadium however, was pretty cool”

Check out a report launched a few months ago by Friends of the Earth International with 9 testimonies from community members around the globe who have dramatic first-hand experience of the devastating impacts of climate change.