Bird's Nest a reminder it's about getting inside

Given that I'm an Olympic-athlete-in-training who is living in Beijing, I am reveling in the fact that, for the time being, I don't have to stare at the walls for inspiration.

My bedroom in Beaverton has a lone poster. The tear in the left corner reminds me where I got it. Let's just say that there was a row of posters hanging on the airport windows in Athens during the 2004 Games promoting the next Olympics, and before I boarded a plane back to Portland, there was one fewer.

And at the start of every school year, I always mean to decorate my dorm room with the essentials: a copy of a Van Gogh painting, the football team's schedule, some fun lights, all the things that say trendy college student. But for my first two years, I simply never got around to putting up any more than a white banner with the Olympic rings in the center and USA in bold red.

It was always enough for me.

Now that the Olympic Games are less than a year away, the walls in my room at Beijing University, where I'm studying and training, are emptier than the stadium that was set for Game 5 of this year's World Series.

But not to worry -- the goals are still in sight even without the Olympic paraphernalia. Thing is, all I really have to do is walk a few hundred steps and I'm standing in front of the Beijing University Gymnasium, built specifically to host the table tennis event next summer.

Suddenly the poster that I'd been used to staring at has morphed into something concrete and real, and the Olympic Games is right up in my face everywhere I go, evoking more awe from me than even Brett Favre's performance this season at the age of 38.

Also, whenever I tell the cabby to head east from campus, I pass by quite possibly the most massive building I've ever seen, the National Olympic Stadium, a 91,000-seat venue otherwise known as the Bird's Nest for its architectural design. If all the Olympic venues were a dish at Thanksgiving dinner, the National Aquatic Center ("the Water Cube") is so cool that it could win the gravy award, but it's obvious that the Bird's Nest would be home to one big turkey.

Today as I was sitting in a taxi falling asleep to the lull of Beijing traffic and not particularly looking forward to my afternoon practice, I looked up, and all 42,000 tons of twisted steel that constitute the Bird's Nest called me over to say that I better stay in the gym late today or else the chance to see that venue from the inside-out just might disappear.

Try that for a convenient dose of motivation.

So if desire alone were enough to get me back here next summer, I'd say book your tickets and join me in Beijing --except that it's not. The International Olympic Committee makes qualifying for the Games a tad more difficult, and rightly so. The Olympics is not a free-for-all-tee-ball game.

But this hard?

There will be a total of 84 men and 84 women who will compete in the table tennis event. Each country is allowed a maximum of three players. On the women's side of things, the U.S. team has two former members of the Chinese national team, who since have immigrated and are competing for the United States. Both will almost certainly receive one of 20 automatic bids to the Games based on their world rankings. This leaves one female spot left for grabs on the U.S. Olympic team, which will be tough enough. Maybe I shouldn't even mention that all players must qualify through their respective continent, meaning that I'll also be competing against the best Canadian athletes in a battle for that last spot.

I'm thinking it's a really good thing that I pass by that Bird's Nest all the time.