Results tagged “workersstadium”

Beijing will play host to an NFL preseason game next year, the professional American football league announced today (it had been rumored for a while). The New England Patriots will take on the Seattle Seahawks at 8:30 pm on August 8, 2007 in Workers Stadium. The game will be televised live in both the United States (NBC) and China (CCTV). (The Associated Press story, linked to above, said the game "will be shown live on NBC at 8:30 a.m. ET on Aug. 9. The dateline was "FOXBORO, Mass." -- forgive them if they don't quite understand how the time difference works up in New England.)

According to a recent survey conducted on behalf of London’s Birkbeck College, China’s soccer fans are as keen as ever on footie-behemoth Manchester United, with one important factor cited as being the opportunity for fans to see top players performing to the max on the field. “If they go to watch top performers in action, Chinese fans want to see them perform well,” the findings reveal. Well what a disappointment this season’s English premiership competition must have been to them so far. Ten points adrift from leaders Chelsea in the table, sitting ignominiously behind Tottenham Hotspur and minnows Charlton Athletic, and having suffered defeat at the hands of Blackburn, following which manager Sir Alex Ferguson was booed by his own fans, Man U’s sparkling performances have not exactly been coming thick and fast to delight stalwart Chinese fans. But you would be hard-pressed to predict that this love affair will do anything but die hard. Following this summer’s friendly between the English premiership side and Beijing Hyundai, the China Daily noted, “thousands of Chinese fans in the crowd of 24,223 in Beijing's Workers Stadium wore red Manchester United jerseys”. The club has its own Chinese website, www.manunited.com.cn, offering, among other things, an SMS information service for fans requiring up to the minute news on the team. Perhaps more importantly, the club also just signed its first ever Chinese player, Dong Fangzhuo, who debuted in the Beijing Hyundai Game alongside the likes of Wayne Rooney and Rio Ferdinand. However, it would nonetheless appear that the pre-match hopes of many a Chinese supporter have been borne out in what has been seen of the 2005 Premiership season so far. The survey reveals of Chinese fans attending the Beijing game that “many indicated they were at the game in anticipation of Beijing claiming a shock win”. With the way things are currently going for the northern England team, perhaps not such a vain hope after all …

Out of 210,00 proposed slogans for the 2008 Beijing Olympics, this is the best the event's organizers could come up with: "One World, One Dream." The slogan was announced Sunday during a nationally televised extravaganza at Beijing's Workers Stadium that featured "breakdancers, basketball players performing with a military band, and television celebrities," according to the Associated Press. The slogan replaced the previous "New Beijing, Great Olympics" and, according to state news service Xinhua was decided upon only after many rounds of "selection and revision by experts in fields like Olympics, sociology, sports, culture and language."