Attack destroys Olympic reverie

You went to the Great Wall of China on the first morning of the Olympics to watch a 152-mile bicycle race.

You traveled 50 miles from the site of a majestic opening ceremony to get there, having just seen Beijing make a sweet first impression.

You watched more than a hundred bikes swoosh by, breaking away past checkpoints like the North Gate of Temple of Heaven and the Great Hall of the People.

Tiananmen Square just up ahead.

The mood of the city was anything but forbidding.

Strangers were treating you with a practiced kindness and charm.

Olympic volunteers did not miss a chance to greet you with a hello, whether in your language or theirs.

China, you told yourself, was off to a great start.

It took but a few hours more to intrude on your reverie. A formal statement from the United States Olympic Committee flashed onto the screen of your PDA.

Something terrible had happened at a central Beijing landmark called the Drum Tower, due north of the Forbidden City and Tiananmen Square.

Two individuals with family ties to a U.S. coach had been stabbed in broad daylight. One was dead. So was the man with the knife, by his own doing.

It happened a little past noon, practically at the same time that those Olympians in the men's road race came whizzing by on 143 bikes.

Your heart sank.

Anxiety and grief already had come to a Games not yet 24 hours old. A host city eager to provide joy to the world had been placed all too abruptly on edge.

You automatically expected everyone in a city with a population of 17 million to feel responsible or be taken to task for the irrational actions of a single man.

You wondered if fear-mongers would take pains to portray a moment of random violence as something far more devious -- a plot, a pattern, a hidden hatred of your kind.

You worried that visiting dignitaries like the president of the United States and the mayor of Chicago would feel compelled to remind their security companions to stay on high alert.

You could see it being chalked it up as Beijing's ugly international incident, as if it bore a resemblance to a Munich terrorist raid or a pipe bomb in an Atlanta park.

The details were lurid.

A 47-year-old man identified as Tang Yongming was found dead, an apparent suicide, after an attack on two Minnesota tourists, Todd and Barbara Bachman, whose daughter is a former Olympic volleyball player from UCLA and is married to the coach of the U.S. men's volleyball team.