More Opening Ceremony unpleasantness: dancer paralyzed in rehearsal, accident hushed up.

Photo taken from this Korean-language article.

This story's almost a week old but I haven't seen much made of it yet. A young woman was to perform the ceremony's only solo routine, but was injured in a late-July rehearsal, and the story was buried until last week. From the New York Times:

A talented, 26-year-old Chinese dancer was seriously injured during a rehearsal for the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympic games just 12 days before the show, and faces the prospect of being paralyzed for the rest of her life.

Liu Yan, considered one of the country’s top classical Chinese dancers, was preparing the performance of a lifetime: the only solo dance in a four-hour spectacular that was expected to be seen by a global audience of more than one billion people.

But on July 27, during an evening rehearsal at Beijing’s National Stadium, the so-called Bird’s Nest, she leaped toward a platform that malfunctioned and plunged about 10 feet into a shaft, landing on her back, according to family members.

. . .

Her head was not badly injured, and she can move her arms. But she has no feeling below her chest, she said in a hospital bed interview. She cannot move her lower body, including her legs.

Doctors have told her family it is unlikely she will ever walk again.

. . .

The organizers of the opening ceremony initially asked witnesses and friends not to disclose the accident ahead of the Olympic Games on Aug. 8, according to people who have visited Liu in the hospital.

But earlier this week, after inquiries from several newspapers, members of the Beijing Olympic Committee visited Liu and announced that they would soon hold a news conference.

For the most part, the Chinese state-run news media have not reported the accident, although Peoples Daily, the Communist Party’s official organ, mentioned it in a small article on Tuesday.

. . .

“I hope one day I can just stand up like a normal person,” she said wiping away tears.

The fireworks were fake, the singer was fake, the children representing China's minority groups were fake, and now this, to say nothing of the American killed in broad daylight at a Beijing tourist attraction, the gymnasts that more and more evidence is suggesting are underage, or the other scandals that have yet to be revealed. What a mess.

Go read the NYT article, it's short. In it Zhang Yimou expressed regret at what happened, saying if he had given clearer instructions there may have been fewer injuries. Zhang talked more about the, um, "challenges" of planning and rehearsing the Opening Ceremony in an AP report compiled from varous sources.

[Zhang] told the popular Guangzhou weekly newspaper Southern Weekend that only communist North Korea could have done a better job getting thousands of performers to move in perfect unison.

"North Korea is No. 1 in the world when it comes to uniformity. They are uniform beyond belief! These kind of traditional synchronized movements result in a sense of beauty. We Chinese are able to achieve this as well. Though hard training and strict discipline," he said. Pyongyang's annual mass games feature 100,000 people moving in lockstep.

Performers in the West by contrast need frequent breaks and cannot withstand criticism, Zhang said, citing his experience working on an opera performance abroad. Though he didn't mention specific productions, Zhang directed an opera at New York's Metropolitan Opera in 2006.

"In one week, we could only work four and a half days, we had to have coffee breaks twice a day, couldn't go into overtime and just a little discomfort was not allowed because of human rights," he said of the unidentified opera production.

"You could not criticize them either. They all belong to some organizations ... they have all kind of institutions, unions. We do not have that. We can work very hard, can withstand lots of bitterness. We can achieve in one week what they can achieve in one month."

Read that whole article, too, for context, but here's another excerpt:

Some students of the Shaolin Tagou Traditional Chinese Martial Arts School in Henan province who began training for the event last May were injured in falls on the LED screen that forms the floor on which they performed and was made slippery by rain, said Liu Haike, one of the school's lead instructors.

"At one point, the children had to run in four different directions. ... When one fell, others quickly followed," Liu said, adding the injuries were minor.

While in Beijing, the constant exposure to the dizzyingly hot summer resulted in heatstroke for some students, particularly during one rain-drenched rehearsal that stretched on for two days and two nights.

The students were kept on their feet for most of the 51-hour rehearsal with little food and rest and no shelter from the night's downpour, as the show's directors attempted to coordinate the 2,008-member performance with multimedia effects, students and their head coach told the AP.

"We had only two meals for the entire time. There was almost no time to sleep, even less time for toilet breaks," Cheng said. "But we didn't feel so angry because the director was also there with us the whole time."