Up and over - the end is in sight

There comes a point in every Olympics when, for some athletes, the Games give way to the fun and games.

For one European team, that moment was at the hockey venue early yesterday.

As a group of athletes queued up to watch a match, one woman slipped her arms around the neck of a male team member, leaped up and wrapped her legs around his waist.

We kept walking, rapidly, before it got any saucier, but it seemed safe to assume that those two had finished competing and were set on partying.

Fair enough. When athletes have trained for years, sacrificing nights out on the town, it's only natural they'll let their hair down once their events are over.

It could be that the hockey venue will become party central for these Games. In Athens, a beer company set up a huge indoor-outdoor bar area in the central city. It was the watering hole of choice for the great and the good of world sports. Beijing doesn't seem to have such a venue, well, not one on the scale of that anyway.

But at the hockey early yesterday there sure was a party atmosphere, although it was dampened somewhat for Kiwis when the Spanish snuck a goal home with two seconds to spare.

The courtyards around the pitches were humming. Orange-shirted Dutch supporters seemed to be enjoying themselves every bit as much as the amorous athletes out front and there were long queues at the beer stands.

Inside, the Kiwi contingent were trying their darndest to be the loudest. A group of die-hard hockey fans in "Black Stick Whanau" t-shirts gave polite support, while, across the way a rowdier mob led chants and cutting quips. When play was stopped for an age while the umpires ruled on whether to allow a New Zealand goal, one Kiwi wit yelled: "Come on - the Chinese built the Great Wall faster than this!"

A cluster of New Zealand athletes, including the women's basketball team (favourite chant: "You gotta shoot and score, shoot, shoot and score") and tennis player Marina Erakovic (sporting a new hairdo) were there too, all on their best behaviour.

From a New Zealand point of view, the most worrying thing was the sight and sounds from the group of yellow-shirted Beijingers who took up the Kiwi cause with cries of "Xin Xi Lan" (New Zealand).

It wasn't their chanting that was the problem, it was the accompanying racket - the bane of netball stadiums everywhere, those damn thundersticks.

Top: Russian Aslanbek Khushtov throws Lithuania's Mindaugas Ezerskis on his way to victory in their Olympic 96kg Greco-Roman wrestling bout. Photo / AP