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Turning the Bird's Nest into a €300m white elephantCONSIDERING IT cost over €300 million to build and has a capacity of 90,000, there was always a reasonable chance that Beijing's Bird's Nest stadium, the spectacular headquarters for the 2008 Olympic Games, would turn into the mother and father of all white elephants.

Since the Olympic show left town, the owners, initially CITIC Investment Holdings and, later, the National Stadium Co, have tried to come up with ways of making the venue cover its estimated maintenance and interest repayment costs of €18 million a year.

They still don’t have an anchor tenant, football club Beijing Guo’an declining the offer of playing their games there because they could never hope to even come close to filling it.

The bulk of the stadium’s revenue comes from tourists, although the numbers visiting have dropped dramatically since the first year after the Olympics.

And each tourist only pays around €5 for entry which, allied to the decreasing number of visitors, doesn’t come close to covering those annual costs.

There are longer term plans for the stadium to be transformed into a shopping and entertainment complex, and it has secured the hosting rights to the 2015 World Athletics Championships, but, for now, the owners try to keep things ticking over by staging an assortment of sporting, cultural and business events.

Last winter, for example, it became a snow park, home to the ‘Happy Snow and Ice Season’, and it has also been a venue for opera, motor racing, concerts and football games, including, oddly enough, the 2009 and 2011 Italian Super Cup finals.

And this week the Bird’s Nest recruited new clients, Barcelona president Sandro Rosell announcing that the club had taken its “first step towards developing a Barca feeling in Asia” by signing a “strategic partnership” with Chinese company Intersports. Part of the deal is that the club will host a training camp at the Bird’s Nest over the next five summers.

That, then, might have eased the pain of the postponement of one the more peculiar events in the stadium’s schedule: Rodeo China.

In or around 120 cowboys, 180 horses, 36 bulls and 90 steers were due to do their thing for eight days at the Bird’s Nest last month, with the biggest rodeo prize purse in history – around €6 million – up for grabs. “The Superbowl of Rodeo” they dubbed it.

The masterminds behind Rodeo China are Americans Richard and Carrie Tucker, who concluded that introducing the ‘sport’ to China would “enhance the relationship between the two countries on many levels”, according to the ‘mission statement’ on their website.

“We seek to inspire American and Chinese young people to realize that ‘The Code of the West’ principles are the basis for success in life and will help make them better Global Citizens”.

When the event was announced, though, over 70 animal welfare organisations, both Chinese and international, reckoned the ‘Code of the West’ wouldn’t make them better ‘global citizens’ at all, and called for it to be cancelled because of the cruelty inflicted on rodeo animals.

“There are many cases of animal abuse in China, but that does not mean we have to import more abuse from other countries,” Liu Huili, a spokesman for a Chinese animal charity, told The Daily Telegraph.

“Turning the Bird’s Nest stadium into an animal pit is totally disrespectful and if this show is allowed to go ahead it will send out a signal that this sort of culture is acceptable and it will then mushroom across China.”

And with that the event was called off.

Rodeo China, though, claimed it was because of “complex quarantine requirements”, and they still hope it can be rescheduled.

Back in June, artist, architect and human rights activist Ai Weiwei, who was a co-designer of the Bird’s Nest with Swiss architecture company Herzog de Meuron, was released after three months in detention, having been accused of tax evasion by the Chinese authorities.

By then, he had long since regretted his involvement in the project, describing the stadium as a “pretend smile”. “I’ve already forgotten about it,” he told CNN.

When challenged about Weiwei’s detention and whether or not they had any qualms about their rodeo Bird’s Nest project, the Tuckers were unapologetic.

“We hear enough about the bad things that go on,” said Carrie, “We just don’t hear enough about all the good things that go on.”

Three years on?

A white elephant with a pretend smile.

Boylan the perfect horse singer

“THIS WHOLE experience has been surreal for me,” Mark Boylan told the Louisville Courier-Journal, one of a slew of American papers to interview the 14-year-old from Banagher, Co Offaly this week.

And surreal is the only word for the week he’s having, one that will culminate in him singing in front of a crowd of around 70,000 at Churchill Downs today, the Kentucky venue for the Breeders’ Cup.

Boylan first came to attention last year when he wrote a song about the Cheltenham Festival and posted it on YouTube, The Racing Post were sufficiently impressed to pay for the teenager to record the song, proceeds going to the Injured Jockeys Fund.

He followed that up with a tribute to the Breeders’ Cup, called ‘Stateside’, which he also put on YouTube. He sent a link to the people who run the event and they were “blown away”, Peter Rotondo, vice president for media and entertainment for the Breeders’ Cup, told the New York Times, the paper running a feature on Boylan on Thursday.

And with that Boylan and his family – parents Dave and Helene and six-year-old sister Holly – were offered a trip to Kentucky for today’s Breeders Cup, and Mark invited to perform the song for the crowd.

“I couldn’t believe it. I think my mother was quite worried about me because I nearly collapsed on the couch,” he told the NYT.

After the family arrived on Monday, Mark warmed up for today by performing his song in downtown Louisville, before making a number of local television appearances and doing endless rounds of interviews.

A week to remember, then. When he gets home he should pen a tune in time for next year’s Melbourne Cup – if he hasn’t already.

Boom to bust: Jet Brunell crashes and burns

FALLING IN to the ‘and you think you have troubles?’ category: Mark Brunell.

Now 41, and re-signed by the New York Jets during the summer, the quarterback had a pretty good time of it through a career that featured spells with the Green Bay Packers, Jacksonville Jaguars, Washington Redskins, New Orleans Saints and the Jets. His total earnings were estimated to be in or around $50 million (€36.27m).

He used that substantial haul to invest in nine businesses, the bulk of it in a property company . . . you can guess the rest. In short, Brunell has lost everything, and is now facing six lawsuits claiming a total of $24,729,766 (€17.94m) against him. Rather than facing a sumptuous retirement, having filed for bankruptcy, he now plans to work as a medical sales representative just to make ends meet.

Despite the often astronomical earnings in American football, it is estimated by Ken Ruettgers, who started an organisation to help players after their careers ended, that 78 per cent of former NFL players have financial difficulties – some bankrupt – within two years of retirement.

Still, from $50 million to bust? Now that’s what you call an end zone.

The Final Straw 

Nobody died but cricket might just have

THE EDITORIAL in Pakistan's Express Tribuneon Thursday gave a fair indication of just how shocking the whole fixing conspiracy episode has been to a country for which cricket is "our undisputed national obsession, our everlasting faith".

While acknowledging that Salman Butt, Mohammad Asif and Mohammad Amir “did not kill a man . . . did not abuse a woman . . . did not steal billions from the national exchequer . . . (or) commit any of the crimes civilians in Pakistan must endure on an almost daily basis”, there was little sympathy.

“We are made mugs for getting up in the middle of the night, lunatics for investing deep emotional attachment, and fools for arguing with friends in deadly comic earnestness our take on a team’s strategies. The very reason we play and watch organised sporting contests, and have done since the dawn of civilization, is to express our natural urges for aggression, skill, play and wonder – in the knowledge that everyone takes it seriously even though it’s just a game. We do our utmost to ‘kill’ the opposition – but nobody dies.”

Mind you, such was the mood of the writer, it seemed like Pakistani cricket had just died.

Leaping Larry's gone fishing on Rules

LEAPING LARRY is a rather forthright columnist for The Age who has remained a bit of a sceptic on the attractiveness of the International Rules series. Did Friday’s game convert him?

There’s a clue in the headline on his column: ‘We all lose in international snooze’.

He argued, though, that the series hasn’t “become meaningless” because, he reckons, it always has been.

“You don’t achieve meaninglessness overnight, let alone work out whether ‘meaninglessness’ is a real word, or just a sound produced by turning over fitfully on an air-bed with a slow leak.

“The only obstacle standing in the way of this event becoming a massive juggernaut is that a significant majority of Australians don’t care about it . . . because the only sporting scenario involving a net of which they care to partake consists of a boat filled with beer, bait, some mates, and a vague pretence at fishing.”

And Larry, you suspect, will be gone fishing during the next series.