Back to Beijing for an Itinerant Sportswriter

By Michael Quin

For a quarter of a century Mike Osborne has endeavored to marry his work as a journalist with his personal passions for the game, the race, and the fight.

Now on his way to cover his fifth Olympics, he reflects on the highs and lows of being an itinerant sportswriter.

“The Olympics are something the media gets to enjoy almost as much as the athletes,” he says, “I get to see the world, go to other countries, get to test my professional skills in a high-pressure situation. You know, long hours, late nights, hard partying, and you’ve still got to deliver day after day for 18 or 20 days straight. It’s always a good challenge.”

As chief sportswriter for Australian Associated Press, Mr Osborne is returning to Beijing where he spent two years in the mid 90s setting up AAP’s Beijing reporting bureau.

He confesses to some mixed emotions about his return.

Starved in those days of high-quality sport, he survived in Beijing on a diet of general news and finance, while negotiating unfamiliar political terrain with only enough Mandarin essential for any journalist, “to get a taxi and order some beers”.


“It was challenging at every corner,” he says, “not just the languages, the crowds and the pollution, but just the working conditions. Trying to get information out of a communist government is not an easy thing to do.”

He’s had henchmen follow him through Tiananmen Square, investigations blocked and his phones tapped. It was all in a day’s work as a journalist in China, he says.

Human Rights Watch reported last year that journalists who send news out of China, or who merely debate politically sensitive ideas among themselves, face punishments ranging from sudden unemployment to long prison terms.

The Foreign Correspondent Club of China says foreign journalists are not exempt from harassment, detention, and occasional violence.

Based on his experiences, Mr Osborne has no doubt these reports are true, saying foreign media living and working there have it “pretty tough”.

“Things are being loosened up for the Olympics,” he says, “but I expect they’ll go back to being pretty well controlled after the Olympic Games are over.”

Others, like Chinese academic blogger, Liang Jing, disagree. He saw the lack of state control surrounding media coverage of the Sichuan earthquake - China’s worst natural disaster since 1976 - as “an important watershed in contemporary Chinese politics”.

Mr Osborne is more sceptical about any signs of change, saying it’s inevitable the authorities will want to seize back control of the narrative as soon as coverage is directly challenging them.


Whatever the future for Chinese media, the Olympics will be a whole new ballgame for China, he says.

“There’s going to be 10.000 media from the Western world all camped out on their doorstep and there’s just no way they’re going to able to control the message. So, if something really big happens, they’re just going to have to live with whatever coverage is delivered. What the free Western press does pretty well is get to the bottom of a story, so I’m not worried about them trying to control us at all,” he says.

“I don’t think they have an idea what they’re letting themselves in for. I think they have an idea of what it’s about, but they don’t really have a full understanding of how the Western press works and exactly what it’s going to be like having everyone there.”

The Olympic torch fiasco, says Mr Osborne, showed China’s ignorance of the world’s potential willingness to disrespect official ceremony.

While disagreeing with political boycotts of sporting events – especially while countries continue to have trade and other relationships – Mr Osborne has no problem with people politicising the torch.

“I think the torch relay’s a bit of a joke really. It’s a political event, it’s got nothing really to do with sport, there’re no winners or losers. It’s just a very long promotional tour to push the Games. So if politics wants to get involved with that, that’s fine. I would’ve protested too if I had a gripe,” Mr Osborne says.

Mike says confidently the Beijing Games themselves will be a great spectacle.

“I know China will deliver a great Olympics because it’s a communist country and when they say they’re going to do something, they do it. So I’m looking forward to seeing how well organised they’ll be. I think they’ll be much better organised than the Athens Olympics,” he says.

I ask what’s so special about the Olympics for Mike. He chuckles, no doubt as a collage of amazing moments races through his head.

“Watching Debbie Flintoff-King win gold in athletics in Seoul, seeing Kathy Freeman win in Sydney. It’s the excellence in sport, but it’s also the overall experience that really matters,” he says.

“I mean you can see great sport anywhere in the world at any time, but the Olympics is the pinnacle. It’s the whole experience around having 28 sports all doing their best at the same time, it’s pretty special.”

With a more nostalgic tone he recalls, “Sitting under the Parthenon, drinking Retsina and eating Greek salad was pretty special too.”

Not having been to Greece, I wonder aloud what Retsina is. It’s explained to me as a Greek white or rose wine made since ancient times, which due to its peculiar pine oils, was thought of as wood nymph tears.

He goes on to explain the Games are about whole cities coming to life.

Barcelona, he says, was one of the greatest. With all its street life, eclectic inhabitants, architecture and food, he recalls with the same nostalgic tone when recalling nights under the Parthenon, that living and breathing the city of Barcelona during the Olympics was an unforgettable experience.

But Sydney, he’s convinced, was the friendliest and the best.

“Nothing really tops the Sydney Olympics, the spirit and the atmosphere that was there in Sydney was amazing. I can see why the IOC holds up those Games as the greatest. Athens certainly didn’t reach the same level as Sydney,” he says.

He recalls the spirit of each Games the way socialites describe the vibes of parties: this one was lively and that one friendly, and the next, he predicts, may be a bit more formal.

Interestingly, no matter how excited Mr Osborne may be about the heroes of world sports he’ll have the chance to rub shoulders with, it’s the old fraternity he’ll be sharing this next Olympic party with.

“Most media tend to enjoy the company of other journalists and don’t tend to want to socialise necessarily with athletes,” he says. “I think we’ll leave the athletes to do their own socialising and we’ll get on with our own partying which is probably, you know, in the tradition of journalists, pretty hard drinking and hard talking sort of stuff.”