Not just a beautiful backhand: brainy, too!

(With update, below)

I see from outside-world reports that Justine Henin might give up the chance to defend her Olympic gold medal in tennis, because she is so concerned about what the air in Beijing might do to her lungs. She has asthma and recently had to drop out of the last tournament she attempted to play here.

As noted earlier, I am against the idea of any threatened official boycotts of the Olympic games. The Beijing Olympics have become (despite many local grumbles) a source of pride for Chinese people broadly, not just for the regime. But I wonder whether we'll see many more individual "boycotts" of the sort Henin has mentioned.

Perhaps not, since this step is easier for a tennis player to take than for just about any other athlete. Big-time tennis stars are individual performers rather than team players; they have a tournament every week and a hugely-hyped Grand Slam four times a year; if they want to play for their country, they've got the Davis and Federation Cups; the Olympic title is a nice little fillip but not really what the sport (or their career) is about. It would be as if golf were added to the Olympics and Tiger Woods tried to see how it fit his schedule.

Things are completely different for swimmers, gymnasts, most track-and-field athletes, wrestlers, rowers, etc. For them to skip the Olympics would be a profound sacrifice and perhaps a blow to the national team's chances. So maybe this will be a case of one. Or one of a few, if some NBA players pass.

But still I wonder (as promised, without adding any pictures) why the Olympic committee isn't operating on emergency footing, as if the impending Games faced a truly dire threat.

I can understand why it's not perceived within China that way. As best I can tell from English and Chinese-language news sources here, so far there's been no mention of Justine Henin's comments.*

* For anyone interested, I searched Baidu's and Google's Chinese-language sites for combinations of