China's Everest Olympic torch run is grand - but secret

BEIJING (AP) - Chinese mountaineers made final preparations Wednesday to take the Olympic torch up Mount Everest in a grand but contentious feat for the Beijing Olympics that is being accorded an unusual mixture of fanfare and secrecy.

State-run China Central Television began the first of what are billed as elaborate and technically difficult live broadcasts from Everest's base camp for the torch's journey up the world's tallest peak. Mountaineers were completing the setup of a staging point at 8,300 meters (27,390 feet) for the final assault on the 8,850-meter (29,035-foot) summit, CCTV reported.

Yet there was no word on the location of the torch, which mountaineers on the 31-member climbing team would go to the summit, their whereabouts and when they would scale the peak. The Web site of Beijing Daily likened the lack of information to a "mysterious veil that has surrounded base camp."

Some media reports had speculated that the climb could come as early as Wednesday - the 100-day countdown to the August 8-24 games - or Thursday - the May Day holiday. A brewing storm made a climb in the next three days unlikely, the Xinhua News Agency cited Yang Xingguo, the expedition's weather expert at base camp, as saying late Wednesday.

Instead to commemorate the 100-day mark, Beijing held a mini-marathon and song gala. Senior Communist Party leader Jia Qinglin urged all Chinese "to pool our patriotic passion to accumulate a mighty force that could overcome all difficulties in a bid to hold a successful Olympics." Meanwhile, the Chinese and foreign reporters at Everest base camp waited.

Still billed as a spectacular event in the buildup to the August games, the Everest climb is being given mixed treatment. With the torch relay dogged by protests worldwide and Beijing's oft-criticized rule in Tibet drawing heated scrutiny after widespread anti-Chinese protests this spring, organizers have placed a premium on security.

The Everest torch, specially designed to burn in frigid, windy, oxygen-thin Himalayan air, is a sister flame to the one that made its way around the world and Wednesday reached Hong Kong, returning to Chinese territory after a month abroad. Organizers did not publicize the Everest flame's travel to base camp over the past month, apparently to avoid protests.

Beijing has also exercised its diplomatic clout, persuading neighboring Nepal to bar climbers from border-straddling Everest's southern face to keep potential protesters from reaching the peak and spoiling the torch's moment.

But the secrecy has also dented plans by organizers and CCTV, which spent heavily on special broadcast facilities, to promote a torch run that is physically challenging but that has been criticized by Tibetan activists as a symbol of Chinese domination of Tibet.

"It's a challenging mountain, not because of technical problems. It's easy technically. But because of the height, it's difficult and dangerous," said Pierre Maina, a Danish surgeon and mountaineer who is preparing to scale Everest from the northern side in Tibet next year.

Oxygen bottles are a must above 7,800 meters (25,750 feet), the Tibet Mountaineering Training School said. Everest's northern face is said to be subject to harsher, windier weather than the Nepal side, with usually just two chances to make the summit in May, the choice season for climbing.

The head of the China Mountaineering Association, Wang Yongfeng, has said he nearly died in a 1993 Everest expedition in part because he used up his oxygen bottle near the summit and emergency supplies were at staging camps below. "Regardless of the weather, we must get the sacred flame of the Olympics to shine over Mount Qomolangma," state media has quoted Wang as saying, using the Chinese name for Everest.

Maina, the Danish climber, was at the base camp of nearby Cho Oyu in September 2006 and saw Chinese security shoot at Tibetans fleeing over the Nangpa pass to try to reach Nepal. A Buddhist nun was killed, and the experience colored Maina's views about the Olympic torch's Everest trek.

"What I experienced in Tibet makes feel bad about what they are doing with the Olympic Games," he said by phone from the Danish town of Slagelse.

State media and Olympic officials have gushed that the Everest climb would symbolize universal Olympic ideals and have largely omitted talk about Chinese dominance. A local newspaper in Hubei province last week said the ascent would "create a peak for Olympic history and give expression to the acme of the Olympic spirit."

CCTV's coverage of the ascent is believed to be the fourth broadcast of an Everest climb and the most extensive. Broadcast equipment has been placed at four climbing camps, from 6,500 meters (21,450 feet) to the highest staging base at 8,300 meters (27,390 feet) and a camera will accompany the final assault, the broadcaster has said. A full-scale dress rehearsal with 86 in crew was staged in May last year.

Yet despite the grand plans, the 10 foreign reporters at base camp said the carefully controlled doses of information they were given seemed designed to make sure that any mishaps went unreported.

"Having invited us here to cover the ascent of the flame, the Chinese appear to have taken fright. It now seems that they only want us to report the victorious summit moment," the BBC's Jonah Fisher said in an online diary. "We may never know if there were failed attempts, or indeed if someone hurt themselves trying for the top. The only fact we possess is that the flame is somewhere in the area."