This wasn’t for lack of effort — which took me out past the new Olympic city to the end of the new northern subway extension. Guided by an adventurous photographer from Philly recently settled in Beijing, I came to see a large enclave of unofficial “recyclers,” perhaps a thousand or two former farmhands, all from nearby Henan province, who now saw better opportunity in picking, sorting and cleaning the capital’s plastic bottles, cardboard, cotton rags, obsolete computers and other less palatable detritus. Trash was definitely a Chinese growth industry.

And many were raising their children in concrete block huts set in the midst of the stink and waste. This was a China far from cheery Olympic banners urging citizenry to create “green and cultural zones” or to “start up a new trend — pay attention to civilization!”

Still, aside from growling guard dogs, no one blocked our unwelcome attention. One tenant trash sorter even explained how barriers to transport out of the city during the Olympics had killed his usual income of $20 a month. Other men, playing pool in place of working, would only say they were enjoying their two-week “holiday.”

Unlike numerous past trips, when I had been followed by vans of Public Security Bureau spies, or escorted everywhere as required by government minders from bogus “host” organizations — in early years to block scrutiny of sensitive issues but later merely to scrounge expensive meals off the rich foreigner — this time I was free of obvious impediments.

Restrictions for journalists had been loosened step by step in recent years, and flung aside altogether, at least temporarily, as China strained to show the world its “open” response to the Sichuan earthquake. Now, aside from having to register with local police if I wasn’t in a hotel, I could presumably have traveled beyond Beijing to anywhere in the country (excluding Tibet).

Some had predicted, in the run-up to the Olympics, that such free access would lead to a deluge of negative stories as muckraking foreign journalists ran amok. So what happened to those stories? Where the chilling exposés of human-rights outrages or peasants disgruntled over irrigation water diverted to feed Beijing’s splashing stadium fountains?

Maybe there is a Nixonian “silent majority” out there who feel these games are a giant waste of human resources and state treasure. As is so often the case, dissent came through to me solely in the form of whispered jokes. The five fuwa, cutesy Olympic mascots based on ancient Chinese elements, were being called the “five disasters” — in reference to all that had befallen the country in the past year. The “Bird’s Nest” stadium was mocked as “impermanent” and “easily crushed,” like real nests in nature. And the impressive procession of opening fireworks meant to symbolize “footsteps” in the air were said to be stepping on the people instead.

According to more grapevine humor, those angriest at China’s leaders were the many prostitutes kicked out of town just when a huge harvest of horny young Westerners were there for the picking!

But I couldn’t report much on the large number of Muslims from Xinjiang province who once populated Beijing. Their larger neighborhoods have been bulldozed away, while many were recently sent home or had simply left. Even Niujie (Cow Street), a popular tourist area around Beijing’s largest mosque, has been eaten away by office towers.

There was no point in interviewing the docile, skullcapped Uighur waiters in the lamb restaurants in the area, as cowed as the street name.

And I can’t tell you much on meeting a Tibetan businessman — who was being subjected to harsh questioning every time he traveled, even as he planned, like most other Tibetans, to skip town altogether during the games.

I did get to meet Ma Jian, a famed dissident author normally living in exile in London, but mainly because Ma dared to defy orders given him when he entered the country to refrain from public appearances and “anti-Olympic” activity.

Viewing the Chinese body politic as near death since the Tiananmen massacre of 1989 — a metaphor advanced brilliantly in his new novel, “Beijing Coma” — the writer urgently wanted to spread his view of the Olympics as a planned campaign to crush dissent akin to the Cultural Revolution. That seemed a bit extreme, but it was certainly true that I couldn’t write about the dozens of other activists and authors already jailed, especially Hu Jia, the meek and mild Web site host who was imprisoned, though ill and with a pregnant wife, for “crimes” such as being an advocate for AIDS sufferers.

And I didn’t bother to see for myself the three parks designated as “political protest” areas during the games when other reporters informed me that every Chinese person they followed, including a lawyer advocating workers’ rights and two elderly women in a long-running dispute over evictions by rich developers, had been hauled off and imprisoned as soon as they dared apply for a protest permit.

For most Olympic guests, any such grumpy notes are drowned out by tens of thousands of enthusiastic young volunteers trained to say, “Have a great day!” and “See you again!” Even the out-of-work massage girls perched in barber chairs around the city cheer for favorite sporting idols like attractive diver Guo Jingjing.

China’s mass media has finally mastered the machinery of celebrity mythmaking. And it has also figured out the most modern means of efficient repression. Better than muzzling those with dangerous thoughts is creating a populace so focused on personal goals and consumerism that they have nothing to say in the first place. For this strategy, who can blame them? They are merely learning from us.

Fed up with the miscellany of bizarre contests that stray tickets had handed me, I headed straight over to the by-now booming scalper market, conducted openly and with official blessing outside the main subway transfer point to the Olympic complex. I wasn’t looking forward to cutthroat haggling, but I had to get back to the roots of my fandom — and, with just a few hours left before the evening athletic session, I found pricing dropping rapidly into my range.

An upper-tier ticket in hand — fingers crossed that the electronic scanners would pronounce it real — I had just time enough to walk six long blocks to the first local restaurant within the vast, vapid zone of sterile new construction surrounding the National Stadium. In a giddy mood, I overordered as usual: hand-shredded mutton with chilies and leeks, home-style tofu, half-moon leek cakes and numbing Sichuan hot eel strips over vermicelli. If ever there were an Olympics of cuisine, China would dominate even more than it was doing already: At this tatty, humble dive, the menu (with lurid color photos to point at) ran to 36 pages and everything from pumpkin to frog.

A full moon was coming up over the Olympic Green, by evening properly populated with ticket holders. Banks of giant TVs were set into rows of new skyscrapers beyond the iridescent humming of the “ice cube” aquatic center. Up close, the latticed “bird’s nest” itself was worthy of hours of gawking, if somewhat marred by the lurid color scheme of its lighting and stairways. Inside, it seemed more like just another half-domed stadium, and, given its illusion of openness, was so devoid of cross-breeze ventilation that every Chinese lady in the crowd fanned herself through the multiple heats and medal ceremonies.

Aside from their primal beauty, the main advantage of the track and field events were that they really did draw everyone in the world, to both the events and the stands. There was no way for one nation to dominate through noise or accomplishments, not even the Chinese on this night.

And what a night of drama for my $90 investment: the stocky Estonian so elated at winning the discus throw with one extraordinary heave that he did a full 100-meter dash as celebration, jiggling all the way; the last-second stumble of Lolo Jones and her agonized clutching at her hair as she remained on the track, not wanting to leave; likewise, the exhortations of Briton high jumper Germaine Mason to get the crowd to rhythmically clap him toward an unexpected silver medal; a devoutly hooded girl from Bahrain looking like Batgirl as she even more unexpectedly led her heat; a 1,500 meters without favorites, won once more by a Bahrain entrant; watching runners Jeremy Wariner, Usain Bolt and Dayron Robles win their heats without even getting out of breath.

It was even a day when the security volunteers went out of their way to shout, “Have a great time!”; when English-speaking Beijingers helped lead the subway exodus where signs were missing; and a family of farmers from the countryside, holding several sleeping babes on their shoulders in the hot sun, kept insisting that I take the first taxi ahead of them. On this day, even I wanted to believe that the Olympic ideal was indeed untattered, the flame eternal rather than powered by methane and the heat of jingoistic blather.

Even so, between anthems and agonies, I sketched out a plan to save the Olympic movement from itself and move back to the purity of my boyhood visions, if not the Greeks themselves. Some of these ideas have been floated in some form or another already, but in any case, here’s my immodest proposal.

First, save huge costs, the planet and political tussling by rotating the Olympics among perfectible, permanent sites on each continent. (For instance, winter in Norway, Canada, Japan, Russia, Chile; summer in Sydney, Barcelona, Los Angeles, Nairobi.) So that too many events aren’t crammed together, causing spectators at home or at the games from missing most of the action, reduce the main body of the Olympics to its traditional core sports: athletics, gymnastics, wrestling, weightlifting, swimming. Precede these with an “entertainment” Olympics, more of an exhibition, in which too silly or too professional sports are eliminated and more common ones like squash, golf and bowling are added.

To reduce nationalism, have all flags banned from stadiums — countries can host celebrations in educational national pavilions afterward. All participants should wear Olympic uniforms, devoid of national symbols, and be crowned in laurels, not heavy metal medals. The official count of winners by country would also be eliminated. And while it would be impossible now to return to the days of strict amateurism, with its smug hypocrisy, Olympians would be made to agree not to accept any commercial endorsements or profits for at least two years from their performance.

Finally, the fat bureaucracy of the IOC and all its perks would be eliminated in favor of elected governing bodies for individual sports. And above all, the largess of corporate sponsors could be used to make the games entirely free of admission charges — with the large proceeds from world television rights donated to worthy charitable causes. In other words, a nonprofit Olympics with no behind-the-scene games.

Sound too utopian? Too “bleeding heart”? Until then, I guess, the best that we’ve got is track and field and a bunch of sweet swift deities in spikes.

That’s why the biggest fuss of the Olympics thus far here was hurdler Liu Xiang’s failure to compete in Monday’s 110-meter heat. Among the deluge of gold medals and collective exultation, his was scripted to be the most golden moment. Since winning the first track gold ever for China in Athens, Liu has by far been China’s most recognizable celebrity. Forget the ping-pongers and pimply gymnasts. Those are a dime a dozen. Liu, with his mop of hair and mottled good looks, was not just quick but cocky, less a patriot than a perfect icon, the first Chinese to really look just right in Nikes.

He had already parlayed his status into millions of yuan, as the spokesman for just about every Chinese product, and was slated to not just earn zillions more but a place in some eternal pantheon by winning his ultimate race before his own people.

Never mind that a young Cuban had already beaten him this year and that Liu was already having problems with a pesky tendon. The hundreds of volunteers at the Olympic press center, people all over China, stopped dead Monday morning to watch Liu. When he started grimacing, even overgrimacing, it seems, to lay the groundwork for his case for quitting, they hardly took note. He tested the injury in one false start, grabbing his ankle in pain, then tore off his numbered bib in disgust, walking off the track almost nonchalantly toward the lockers. But everyone stood still and waited. The public couldn’t accept what it was seeing.

All day, Chinese TV replayed the story of Liu’s life, interviews with his parents, past race victories. They also showed his coach breaking down in tears hundreds of times over. On Web sites, some accused him of being a coward, a quitter, betraying the fatherland. Even if he crawled on his hands and knees, he should have crossed the finish line. Perhaps, in a certain sense, the same cool modernity that had made Liu a symbol for the new China was exactly what it now couldn’t accept.

He had listened to the best advice, he had cared about his own health over medals, and he had done the rational, realistic thing in a country that loves to get swept up in the irrational.

Given all this, it was actually a relief to retreat into a hospitality center for the American team’s families and friends, sponsored with great fanfare and frequent branding displays by Bank of America. Set near a far more exclusive and snobby USA House run for official IOC functions, the bank had also commandeered one of Beijing’s larger and more modern multistory restaurants, around a peaceful artificial pond on the grounds of the Workers’ Stadium — ironically, the scene of many mass rallies against the “running dogs of American imperialism” back in the 1970s, when this was the one passable sports facility in town.

In a city too spread out for central meeting grounds and too beset with security barriers, many Olympians were using the bank’s largess. In a brief time, I met top volleyballers, softballers, even just-defeated sprinter Lauren Williams and her smart, sassy schoolteacher mom (who, under her breath, admitted that she’d already seen enough of what she felt was a very unexotic and unfun East). Beyond the many TV screens, all the comforts of home were here, from Internet access to the salad bar that one media rep told me was the hardest reach for local cooks.

And here, in what felt instantly to me like some Midwest main street or Southern California mall, the talk wasn’t about medal counts or national honor, but best friends from high school and trips to the Great Wall. Aside from Michael Phelps, the U.S. has had a tough ride here — with plenty of spills, injuries and upsets. But I didn’t sense any resentment around the pitchers of Thousand Island dressing.

After a lifetime of rooting against my own country, of faithfully identifying with underdogs like Cuba, Thailand or Ethiopia (was there anyone at these games who could approach distance-runner Kenenisa Bikele in sheer ease of greatness?), I couldn’t help feeling that years of being the top dog didn’t just inculcate arrogance, but also a certain amount of class, the humility and good manners that come with having already been at the top, already won enough to see that winning isn’t always enough.

Sometimes, I had to admit, there was something admirable and tangible about that “cockeyed American optimism.” But being a reporter at these games has felt like the most futile of many futile attempts to influence the world through native acts of witness. These games will be declared a success because they must be a success, for the Chinese government, for the Chinese people and for all those planning to make millions here. What was the “One World, One Dream” in Beijing’s slogan if not the dream the world shared of cashing in on China’s boom?

Yet, as Liu Xiang’s sudden fall proves, the appeal of the Olympics is the constant threat of unscripted failure. Sports get to the common man because the line between winners and losers, glory and oblivion, is even thinner than in our lives. To paraphrase the great anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss: “Games thus appear to have a disjunctive effect. They establish inequality where there was the previous appearance of none.” And no one, not even the world’s fastest man, can outrun the principle of the Tao.