Olympic pollution

Last night I was having drinks with a China expert and he made a rather startling prediction: Beijing will be the first summer Olympics where no records are broken in track and field. His thinking was that the air quality in China is so poor that the athletes in every outdoor event are going to be severely hampered by it. Certainly, looking at Jim Fallows’s photographs (link via Clive) it is hard to imagine how anyone could comfortably run 100 metres in these conditions let alone 26.2 miles.