Xian Dongmei is a “mommy” gold medalist, and she’s caused a sensation for it in China.

Xian is the first mother who’s captured a gold medal in China. She already had one gold medal under her belt for judo at the Athens 2004 Games. But then she got injured and decided to retire. In early 2007, she had a daughter.

She couldn’t stay away from the judo training center, and with the support of her husband, the 33-year-old decided to get back into judo. She won her second gold medal on Sunday (see photo for her proud moment).

When I saw the headlines on this, I began to wonder how many “mommy” Olympians are out there. What I found just on the U.S. Olympic squad surprised me. There are at least 20. Here’s a list provided by the U.S. Olympic Committee.

Basketball
• Lisa Leslie is the mother of Lauren Jolie Lockwood, born June 15, 2007. A three-time Olympic gold medalist, three-time MVP of the WNBA, and the first woman ever to dunk in a professional basketball game, Lisa Leslie is considered one of the greatest players in the history of women’s basketball. 
• Tina Thompson is the mother of Dyllan, born May 2005. Tina is still playing in Russia (Dyllan is with her).  She is a 2004 gold medalist, 2002 World Championships gold medalist and won four WNBA titles with the Houston Comets.

Equestrian
• Show Jumper Laura Kraut has a son, Bobby.
• Eventer Gina Miles has two children, Taylor and Austin
• Dressage rider Debbie McDonald has a son, Ryan.

Judo
• Valerie Gotay began competing at the international level by the age of 14 and qualified for the U.S. Olympic Team in 1992 at the age of 18. After the Barcelona Games she retired from competition to pursue a degree in psychology at San Diego State University. In 1996 Valerie got married and gave birth to her first of two children.  Valerie decided to return to competition in 2004. 

Shooting
• Brenda Shinn has one son, Kenneth Shinn, who was born January 16, 1987.

Soccer
• Kate Markgraf, defender, Bloomfield Hills, Mich. (but she lives in Milwaukee, Wis.), one son Keegan, who is 21 months. 
• Christie Rampone, defender, Point Pleasant, N.J. (but she lives in Redondo Beach, Calif.), one daughter Rylie, who is almost three years old. 

Softball
• Stacey Nuveman, catcher, La Verne, Calif., has one son, Chase, who was born June 6, 2007.
• Jennie Finch, pitcher, La Mirada, Calif., has one son, Ace Shane Daigle, who was born in May 2006.

Swimming
• Four-time Olympian Dara Torres has one daughter (Tessa) who was born in April 2006. Click here for a bio on Dara Torres.

Tennis
• 2000 Olympic gold medalist Lindsay Davenport, Laguna Beach, Calif., has one son, Jagger Jonathan Leach, born June 10, 2007.

Track & Field
• 2008 Olympic Trials marathon runner-up Magdalena Lewy Boulet (son, 3).  She made the Olympic Team in the women’s marathon. An immigrant from Poland who was sworn in as a citizen on 9/11/01.
• 2005 World Championships silver medalist Chaunte Howard (child is almost 1)
• Aretha Thurmond: 3-time Olympian in the discus. Son Theo was born in June, 2007. She competed 18 days later at the 2007 Outdoor Championships.
• Tiffany Ross-Williams: Two-time USA champion in the 400m hurdles (’07 and ’08 Olympic Trials). Daughter Samya is roughly 3. (Born 2005 sometime.)
• Joanne Dow: Four-time USA outdoor champion (including ‘08 Olympic Trials Champion). has two children: Hannah (born 1989) and Timmy (born 1992).

Volleyball
• 2004 Olympian Robyn Ah Mow-Santos, Honolulu, Hawai'i, has one son, Jordan Nohili Ah Mow Santos, who was born on Feb. 2, 2003.

Weightlifting
• Next time you think you have a busy life consider that of Melanie Roach for some perspective. She's the mother of three small children under the age of six, one of whom is autistic, owner/operator of a gymnastics training facility with over 500 students, wife of a fourth term incumbent Washington State House of Representatives legislator, Sunday school teacher and a U.S. Olympic Hopeful.

The Chaoyang Stadium that is a venue for beach volleyball is a beaut. I went there yesterday and spent a few hours to report on weather conditions at the Olympics (click here for the story), and, naturally, to take a look around.

It was hot. By 2 p.m., the temperature was 95.7 degrees Fahrenheit (35.4 degrees C), and players were talking about the heat. But they were also praising the facility, and the organization of the volleyball events.

“The stadium is great,” an Australian gold medalist, Natalie Cook, told me in the “mixed zone,” the passageway from the playing court outside where athletes speak to journalists.

Cook said the stadium in Bondi Beach in Sydney remains her emotional favorite.

But she added: “This is definitely the best built, the most intimate. The seats come a lot lower, and it’s great to play in.”

Doris Schwaiger, an Austrian contender, had nothing but praise for the organization of Olympic beach volleyball, down to the Austrian play-by-play commentator hired for the games.

“The commentator is the same as the one in the tournament in Austria, in Klagenfurt,” Schwaiger said.

“I think the Chinese did a good job on everything. I haven’t found anything that is not OK. I can only congratulate the Chinese people. This is better than we expected,” she added.

The opening ceremony of the Olympic Games was squeaky clean, free of any overt politics. Or at least that’s the impression I got from watching the main channel of China Central Television.

If any athletes whipped out a Darfur banner or a Free Tibet T-shirt, I (and all of China) missed it. I saw no foreign athletes wearing masks against the air pollution, or pins or lapels pushing any cause.

What I saw were a lot of stadium seats filled with excited, and very hot, people. They cooled themselves as best they could with hand fans, some of them bathed in sweat on a sultry summer evening. The ceremony went over four hours long, ending just after midnight.

Yet there were minor moments, political or not, that struck me, especially the parade of athletes from the 204 countries taking part in the games.

Apart from China, guess which country’s athletes waved Chinese flags as they marched through the stadium? No, it wasn’t the squad from Hong Kong, nor was it the team from Macau. The Taiwanese athletes did not hoist the red flag of China.

Japan, China’s most loathed historical foe, instructed its athletes to clutch small Chinese and Japanese flags together as they circled the stadium. I thought it a generous touch.

So who got the biggest cheers? From the television broadcast, big cheers went up in the crowd for Spain, France, Russia, Iraq and … Canada. I couldn’t figure that last one until I saw Mark Rowswell walking among the Canadian athletes. Rowswell is known to one and all Chinese as “Da Shan,” the foreigner who has utterly mastered Chinese and appears on national television all the time as an emcee and product promoter.

Of China’s neighbors, I’d say the loudest cheers in the crowd went up for North Korea.

And of course there were thunderous cheers for the Chinese squad. The stadium shook with chants of, "Zhongguo, jia you!" or "Let's go, China!"

The stands were filled with dignitaries of all kinds, presidents and princes, but on Chinese television, the cameras constantly lingered on the Chinese leaders. While party chief Hu Jintao was first among equals, the entire standing committee of the Politburo sat beside him. So did former President Jiang Zemin and his wife. Jiang, after all, led the Chinese government when Beijing won the right in 2001 to host the games.

It’s clear that the party is staking all on the games going well. I think they will probably sleep well tonight.

Just a few days ago, Muslim militants killed 16 policemen in China’s far west. An Islamic group has made new threats against the Olympic Games.

So this analysis of the real threat to the Games, from a Hong Kong risk analysis group, is particularly timely. Here is what Steve Vickers, a former chief investigator with the Hong Kong police, writes:

There has been much publicity and debate as to the Actual Security Threat at Olympic venues - some of this has been ill informed or sensational in nature.

International Risk's bottom line assessment is that, whilst there is a genuine threat of terrorism in parts of the PRC; particularly those areas in close proximity to Xinjiang  and to the border areas with Pakistan and Afghanistan - that the threat to the actual Olympic venues is assessed as Medium to Low. The separatist groups concerned are not assessed to have the capability to project significant resources to the Olympic venues.

The threat to Hong Kong and the other Olympic venues are similarly assessed to be Medium to Low.

Conversely, escalated levels of "publicity driven stunts" and demonstrations by various NGO's and other peaceful organisations can be anticipated, particularly in Hong Kong and other non-Beijing venues.

The red carpet is getting worn out.

A jam of limousines snarls traffic around the Great Hall of the People.

Never before has a Chinese leader greeted so many illustrious foreign heads of state and government on his home turf in such a short period of time.

The news on CCTV, the state broadcaster, shows one image after another of President Hu Jintao greeting and shaking hands with foreign leaders arriving for the opening ceremonies of the Summer Olympics, just hours from now.

On Thursday, Hu met with the presidents of Laos, Brazil, Algeria, Kazakhstan, Belarus, Vietnam, Sri Lanka, Serbia, Montenegro, Timor-Leste and the top legislator of North Korea.

Also arriving Wednesday or Thursday were heads of state or government from Australia, Afghanistan, Croatia, Israel, Turkmenistan, Gabon, Mali, Latvia, Tajikistan, Madagascar, Mongolia, Chad, Andorra, Guinea, Slovakia, Kyrgyzstan, Fiji, Samoa, Micronesia and the Seychelles.

While Hu gripped and grinned at the Great Hall, Russian leader Vladimir Putin landed at the airport, arriving just after President George Bush. Bush and his father, former President George H.W. Bush, inaugurated a new U.S. Embassy in Beijing early today (see photo above).

Also this morning, French President Nicolas Sarkozy, Japanese Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda and South Korean President Lee Myung-bak landed. So did the head of the junta in Myanmar.

The list goes on to include princes, sultans and kings. The crown princes of Qatar, Denmark, Holland, Spain, Tonga and Belgium have arrived, as well as Thai’s crown princess and Monaco's Prince Albert and Britain's Princess Anne. Norwegian King Harald V and Queen Sonja are coming. And so is the sultan of Brunei.

A little mystery surrounds one no-show: Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe. One unconfirmed press report said Mugabe made it all the way to Hong Kong before China suggested maybe it’d be better if he went back home.

If U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon shows up, he might as well convoke a session of the General Assembly.

Many Chinese still just don't get it about the media.

In this day and age, it is the readers who decide what the news is. You can bet that all our editors are looking at what gets “hits” on the websites.

So along come some Tibetan activists yesterday to hang a banner on a post near the Olympic Stadium.  In most countries, this would not be a big deal, a matter of a little public disturbance with people trying to express themselves. In China, of course, it’s a bigger deal. This country wants to stifle anything that is not sanctioned.

But here’s the big deal: Chinese security officials want to bully the press into covering only the Olympic events.

Read this blog post from Arnie Berko, a producer from ESPN (you may need to scroll down the blog to find it). If anyone is in Beijing to write and broadcast about sports, it’s ESPN. Arnie just happened to be riding a bike near the stadium at the time of the incident with the Tibet activists. I’ll excerpt a little:

I dropped my bike and started taking pictures. After a few minutes, I wanted to try to talk to the man up on the post. So, I climbed up the hill to get a closer look. I yelled out, "Hey buddy, who are you?" The policemen turned and looked at me, but didn't react. But then, a man in civilian clothes (he was wearing shorts and a T-shirt) started screaming at me and tried to wave me away.

I held up my credential and yelled out, "TV! Media! Press!"

The man kept yelling, speaking mostly in Mandarin; but through some broken English, he pointed to the stadium, saying, "You're only here for [this]." He was implying that I was only here to cover the Games and this protest was none of my business. Then, he screamed, "Who are you? Who are you?" I kept trying to explain I was credentialed media.

Some of the policemen walked toward me and grabbed me by the arm. They were angry and aggressive while holding on to me, yelling in my face. But I still kept yelling, "TV! Media! Press! TV! Media! Press!" The policemen were speaking into their walkie-talkies, but I didn't understand what they were saying.

Soon after the protester hung his banner, a fire truck arrived on the scene and workers removed it.

I then went back to the bottom of the hill and took more pictures. By that point, a fire truck pulled up and moved a cherry picker up the pole to try to bring down the protester. The same civilian came down the hill and started screaming at me again. Some of the onlookers joined in, and I was circled by people who started pushing and shoving me, screaming and pointing to the stadium. I never got hit or punched, but I was definitely physically accosted. I was trying to be smart about it and I wasn't hitting anyone, but I kept yelling, "Media! Press!"

Sorry but having Chinese “civilians” yell at foreign journalists is not going to get anywhere. The same thing just happened to me in Kashgar. I was at the scene of the assault on the police out there and a civilian guy comes up and starts berating my assistant, telling her in Chinese that she was helping the foreign media make China look bad. He told her to leave at once. Then when I was interviewing a local Uighur gentlemen, he went off and grabbed someone else who came along, flashed a badge at the Uighur and hauled him away in the middle of the interview.

Unbeknownst to me at the time, about 45 minutes earlier paramilitary police grabbed two Japanese journalists at the scene and took them away for a beating. Here’s the story I wrote about that.

So back to the point: The story isn’t the Tibetans hanging banners or other matters. It’s about how Chinese government officials, police and ordinary civilians (or in some cases people with power passing themselves off as ordinary civilians) treat the press.

If I’m wrong, have no fear. Blog and newspaper readers will realize it and stop reading. And I’ll be duly silenced.

I’m temporarily far away from Beijing in Kashgar, the westernmost city in China, a Muslim outpost on the Old Silk road. Kashgar has got to be one of the few major Muslim cities in the world where one doesn’t hear a public call to prayers five times a day.

In fact, one doesn’t hear anything from the mosques. Loudspeakers at the mosques are pretty much banned. Anyone who has traveled in the Muslim world knows how unusual that is.

But I digress. Last night, a group of us journalists here in Kashgar to cover a rather horrid mass killing of police officers gathered in front of the Idkah Mosque. It’s a wonderful plaza, and at 10 p.m. it was filled with people. The heat of the desert day had lifted at twilight, which falls at an extraordinarily late hour because China insists that the whole country stay in one time zone. In a corner of the plaza, photographers waited with cameras ready to take pictures of tourists next to a double-humped camel, a goat and some horses, all attached to colorful carts.

Rising above the mosque was a crescent moon -- an almost too perfect image.

The skies were clear. They remain so this morning. I enjoy coming to China’s Xinjiang province partly because there is very little air pollution, unlike Beijing.

Air pollution is on a lot of people’s minds in China this week as the Olympics get started. On McClatchy’s Olympics home page we now have a daily photo taken from the bureau’s balcony, and a link to the Ministry of Environmental Protection’s website to the daily Beijing air pollution index. Right now, that index stands at 88, which is hazy and moderately polluted, at least in my book. It doesn’t yet touch 100, which is when I look out the window and my instinctive reaction to the idea of going to the gym is, “No way!”

Two news stories struck me as I perused the news this morning. First is this New York Times story and accompanying Reuters photo of U.S. Olympic team cyclists arriving in Beijing with custom made black masks over their mouths and noses. An excerpt from the article:

“This is really a surprise because I didn’t think it was going to be such a big deal,” said one of the cyclists, Mike Friedman. “Why we wore the masks is simple: pollution. When you train your whole life for something, dot all your I’s and cross all your T’s, why wouldn’t you be better safe than sorry?

“They have pollution in Los Angeles, and if the Olympics were in Los Angeles, we would probably wear these masks, too.”

Now along comes China Daily, the English-language government newspaper, which this morning has an article with the headline: IOC: Beijing’s air is safe for one and all.

Like many things in China Daily, one can’t distinguish commentary from news. This article seems to be more commentary, and among its memorable passages is the following:

With just three days to go for the Beijing Olympics, a section of the international media has raised the bogey of Beijing's air quality again, saying it fails to meet the (World Health Organization) standards.

But Ljungqvist said the WHO representative in Beijing has expressed "extreme dissatisfaction" with such media for exaggerating the city's pollution problem. Ljungqvist met with the WHO official recently.

"The WHO standards are not intended for temporary visitors," Ljungqvist said. "They are for permanent residents" to guard them against long-term risks.

Oh, get it everyone? During the Olympics, with the dramatic measures China has taken, like shutting down scores of factories, and removing half the cars off the road, the air will not be a risk for those temporarily coming to Beijing. And what happens when all those cars go back on the road? Will the air be “safe for one and all” or will the international press once again be resorting to bogeys? In other words, many Chinese live in Beijing all year around and are not temporary visitors.

If there is one thing you don’t read in the Chinese media, it is clear and concise information about the long-term health effects of living in a polluted environment.

But perhaps that is asking too much.

Since I’ve been posting more videos lately, let me add links to two videos I prepared myself with the help of some tech people in Washington. One video is a brief introduction to Beijing, the Olympic host city. The other is about the sports training system in China, which has some 3,000 sports schools. I wrote a news story on this same issue but it has not yet been released. Once it has been, I'll add a link.