[NBC Sports] With the Olympics at home, Yao Ming starting to feel pressure

Thursday January 03

With the Olympics at home, Yao Ming starting to feel pressure

By Jon Ackerman, NBCOlympics.com

The Beijing Games are a big deal for China, what with these being the first Olympics played in the world's most populous country. The Chinese are intent on showing the world what great hosts they can be, what fascinating structures they can build, what loads of cash they can spend.

Yao Ming, China's most popular athlete, doesn't appear as excited.

Granted, the basketball megastar is nowhere near Beijing, where anticipation for the Olympics has grown as rapidly as the venues that will host the Games. He doesn't regularly see the Bird's Nest or Watercube or new subway lines becoming glistening realities.

Rather, Yao, a center for the Houston Rockets, frequents places such as the Toyota, Pepsi and AT&T Centers.

But he gets questioned about Beijing like he's an Olympic spokesman. More than 200 days remain until the Opening Ceremony, and the inquiries are already repetitive -- sometimes even in the span of five minutes.

"Can you replay that?" Yao asks before an NBA game last month, pointing at a reporter's tape recorder after hearing one such question. "It's all in there. It's all in there."

Yao is reclining in the locker room with his Rockets teammates, and the small media crowd surrounding him busts up -- because Yao himself is laughing. Annoyed by enduring a query he just answered and has surely heard countless times before -- "What are your predictions for your Chinese Olympic basketball team?" -- he shrugs it off with a joke and a chuckle.

"I just told him the team we have right now is very young," Yao answers. "I'm 27 years old, that's pretty old on this team. Those players, they are young, but they also have already played one time in the Olympics and one time in world championships. So they already have some experience and know how to play against the best teams in the world. So the Olympics is a big chance for us to do something special."

And with that, he echoes the sentiment of his homeland: We have a chance to do something special.

In many ways, China already has. It's been reported that Beijing is spending $40 billion to get ready for the Olympics. And the city is well ahead of Athens, the previous Olympic host, in construction, as 36 of 37 venues were completed before the end of 2007.

If Yao's basketball team at the Olympics is even remotely as impressive -- a trip to the semifinals would suffice as remarkable -- not much else could dampen the Chinese spirits. Yao is one of two NBA players that will play for the host nation; Yi Jianlian, a rookie for the Milwaukee Bucks, is the other. Tournament frontrunners like the U.S., Spain and Argentina will boast at least a starting lineup full of NBA veterans.

What China's players lack in talent is made up for with experience, as few will be rookies on the international stage. But Yao knows the Beijing Games will be far different from past Olympics, especially for him.

"The Sydney Olympics, that was my first Olympics. I was very excited I can be on the team, be in Olympics," Yao says. "So actually, I had more excitement than pressure. I'm 20 years old; I'm the youngest player on the team, so all I need to do is just hustle on the court. I don't need to worry about the score, about win or lose. Just play for fun, I'm glad I could be here. Like I said, I play for hustle.

"And in Athens, obviously, I was still excited," Yao says. "The Olympics are once every four years. But I have much more pressures. I have to lead the team, we get into the quarterfinal. That was our goal back (at the beginning of) 2004. We had some success, some tough times, but we fight through it.

"Now talking about 2008, the Games are in my home country," Yao says. "All the people look at us and have a lot of hopes and they wish we can play our best in the Games."

Even a 7-foot-6, 310-pound superstar can bear the weight of a nation.

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