Today's story is about sport, and consequently physical health. That brings us to physical labor, and thus laborers. The relation between the two is deep-rooted. In China of not so long ago, sport (or recreation) was the prerogative of the ruling class. In a way, the laborers didn't need sport to keep fit. Instead, they needed rest more than anything else at the end of every backbreaking day of labor. But sport does not equal all physical activity. It is just one way of being physically active. And in the true sense of the term, it is recreation of the mind too.

The subsequent increase in the use of machinery and division of labor didn't make the life of a laborer any better in China, or elsewhere in the world. Instead, as Marx says in his Manifesto of the Communist Party, "the work of the proletarians has lost all individual character, and, consequently, all charm for the workman. He becomes an appendage of the machine, and it is only the most simple, most monotonous, and most easily acquired knack, that is required of him".

Chairman Mao Zedong was fully aware of the monotony of labor and the loss of individual character of the laborer more than five decades ago when he called for "promoting physical education to improve the people's constitution" and urged countrymen to exercise more to improve their health.

Sport has since the time of Chairman Mao, and more so since Marx, undergone radical changes. It has become an artificial means of achieving fitness, and a big money spinner. Lost is the element of play in leisure. The modern world creates a large class of people engaged in sedentary labor who need physical activity as a diversion.

But not surprisingly the role of physical labor has remained unchanged. The "modern working class", writes Marx, "live only so long as they find work, and who find work only so long as their labor increases capital". It's such laborers who built all the stadiums, the Olympic Village, the roads, the airport terminal, the tubes and the bridges and overpasses that have made China's Olympic dream come true.

These laborers know every meter of the Olympic venues and the other facilities but are not likely to be within kilometers of them when we celebrate the opening of the Games tonight. They are the nameless, faceless people whose each drop of sweat is worth more than any Olympic gold medal. No history will ever record their achievements. No historian will ever write about them. And very few people, if any, will think about them tonight.

Tonight is the night when the Chinese can write their happiest lines. Write, for example, the night is (with apologies to Pablo Neruda) an ocean and the blue stars shine in the distance, and the night wind revolves in the sky and sings. Tonight is the night to remember what Chairman Mao wrote in 1917: "If our bodies are not strong, how can we attain our goals and make ourselves respected?"

Tonight is the beginning of a 17-day festivity of unalloyed joy, of pride in everything that is Chinese, of the belief that this ancient civilization can rise to any occasion. Tonight is the night when we can look forward to the future.

And tonight is the night when we ought to stop and think, spare a thought for the thousands of laborers who made it all come true, and bow our heads in respect.

E-mail: oprana@hotmail.com