大象传媒

Beijing Shooting Range Hall

The great Chinese party is well and truly underway, but at the shooting range this morning it felt like it had been thoroughly pooped.

After the most lavish Opening Ceremony ever staged, the home nation planned to be celebrating the first gold medal of the games by half way through the first morning.

Du Li did it in Athens - could she do it in Beijing too?

The crowd of slightly bleary-eyed Chinese journalists who joined me on the 7.10am media bus to Shijingshan full expected her to be celebrating a successful defence of her title in the 10m air rifle by around 10.50am.

The fans pouring into the venue were all waving red flags with yellow stars on.

1.3bn people expecting a glorious start to the games - the pressure on Du's slender shoulders couldn't have been greater...

Beijing

One of the great inventions of the ancient Chinese world was gunpowder.

So it's not a great surprise that the first Olympic champion of the Beijing Games is very likely to be a Chinese shooter.

is the defending champion in the women's 10m air rifle (yes, I know that you don't need gunpowder to shoot an air rifle).

I'm expecting to see her crowned champion again at around 11am local time (4am UK time) on the first morning of the Games, surrounded by ecstatic local fans.

Look down the list of and it's interesting to note how many of them count as combat sports.

There's boxing of course, judo and taekwondo, wrestling...and hockey. Or maybe that was just at my school.

And then there's fencing. On the surface, it doesn't have a great deal in common with the others. Think boxing and you think rough and ready East End gyms, the , blood, sweat and broken noses. Think fencing and it's all about and the and duels at dawn over the honour of a fair maiden.

The address of the British Fencing Association in London is 1, Baron's Gate. Says it all, doesn't it?

We all know that women are great at multi-tasking. For most of us, that means supervising maths homework while feeding the cats, creating a perfect costume for the nativity play, and holding down a full-time job.

For Britain's star women it means shooting, fencing, swimming, riding and running - all in one action-packed Olympic day.

On the face of it, and I don't have much in common.

Him, 6 foot 4 inches of pure, honed rowing genius. Multiple world and Olympic champion. .

Me, 5 foot and a bit of serial exercise avoidance. Drop-out from all known school sporting activities. Prone to having that one glass too many of .

But when it comes to Olympic Games attendance, we're on a par. OK, so he went five times, and came back with . I'm heading for my fifth in Beijing, and the most I've had to show for it is some rather nice and a lot of special memories.

Like broadcasting live from the steps of the on the first morning of the . Or losing a contact lens on the media bus on the way to the synchronised swimming in Barcelona, which added a certain surreal one-eyed hysteria to the event. Or knowing that every tiny stone on every corner of every street in Athens had more Olympic history at its core than the whole of Atlanta would ever have.

I'll be covering a range of sports in Beijing, most of them involving assault with a deadly weapon - think , and . And I promise to try and avoid my usual trick at the Olympics - every time I turn up, Britain's hopefuls lose the plot completely, and those medals disappear into thin air. Belated apologies to the entire .

Sir Steve can feel very thankful that I waited until he retired before I made it along to the rowing.