Challenges lie ahead in return to paradise

I magine that a summer paradise for all fans of sports exists, and it's better than a tropical Super Bowl in July. I was lucky enough to attend one once -- compete even -- and it was more grandiose than a World Cup soccer match in the middle of Mardi Gras, more inspiring than a clean Tour de France.

So if the gods of this sports heaven, the Olympic Games, came knocking on your door saying that there is the possibility to win a return ticket, would you do what I did? Would you blow on the dice and take on the odds, choose to sweat buckets, and -- just for kicks -- start studying Chinese, too?

More on that to come.

Next August, the 2008 Summer Olympic Games will be staged in Beijing, and I'll be frank: It's where I want to be. I want to spend my summer in a gym, competing against the world's best athletes while wearing USA on my back.

I've had no better feeling than marching into the Olympic stadium in Athens during the opening ceremony of the 2004 Games and realizing that all those dreams and schemes that kept me awake at night weren't just farfetched fantasies. That's why I'm doing it again. The whole sports paradise thing was only one small incentive for me to commit myself to the challenge.

And it's a challenge that started the day after I flew home from the Athens Games three years ago. I was overflowing with stories and pictures from an experience of a lifetime, and my mind, already filled to the brim, needed room to start planning for 2008. The saying "to take things day-by-day" doesn't apply all that well to athletes in training for the Olympics, because for most of us, the four-year span from Games to Games must be meticulously designed to get ourselves exactly where we need to be.

My own four-year plan indicated that I'd be spending a significant amount of time in China at some point because, as the most dominant country in the table tennis world, it is the prime place to be for a player like me. So when I matriculated at Stanford University in the fall of 2005 (no need to stop reading, I'm still a Ducks and Beavers fan at heart), I already had China on my mind. I enrolled in a Chinese language class, made plans to study abroad so that I could stay in school and train simultaneously, and here I am now in Beijing.

The city is rocking harder than Bruce Springsteen in his prime, and the smash-hit song that plays on repeat and reverberates throughout all of Beijing is the Olympic Games.

These are clues that next summer's sports paradise will be great, no doubt, but the pivotal notion that I came to understand while marching in the 2004 opening ceremony was that all of this, all that I'm doing now to earn my way back, just might be better.

So I invite you to follow me over the next few months as I live out my dreams, schemes and experiences in Beijing -- real time.