Despite cruelly long lines caused by tough security measures (and RFID-enabled tickets) at the Olympic opening ceremonies, the uncontrollable chaos expected at the entrance gates never came.
However, a few reports coming out of Beijing suggest that the security wasn't as good as it 
seemed and that the closing ceremonies could face even more challenges.
In an effort to stop counterfeiters and make the opening and closing ceremonies secure, the Beijing committee included RFID chips with spectators' passport information and home/e-mail addresses in each ticket.
Before the Games, most security experts predicted one of two things would happen: Ticket lines would create a standstill at the gates, or hackers would 'break' into the tickets and steal personal information.
In the last two weeks, we've compiled personal anecdotes of people who attended that day and asked them about their experience. The results were mostly positive, with one glaring exception.
According to a Dutch businessman, he was asked to drink his sunscreen to prove it wasn't an explosive and when he explained that he couldn’t drink sunscreen, he was let through without further inquiry. "The security was less than professional and not completely thorough," he said.
Others, like Chinese national Qiyuan Li, felt that the 'speed of [the]
check-in felt all right actually, not too fast not too slow, but slower that the normal airport check-in.'
According to independent reports and the people we contacted, the total wait time to get into the opening ceremony turned out to be about 4 1/2
hours, with one hour in the RFID scanning queue. That's about twice as long as it took to get into the last Super Bowl.
The original process of submitting personal information in order to receive security clearance proved to be easy but long: Submit a photo and passport ID information to the Bank of China for the RFID imprint, and after you've bought a ticket online, submit the specific data in the tickets to the opening and closing ceremonies. You could only do this once. Then, you had to wait about a month to receive it (some didn't receive the tix until the last second). And then you dealt with the line on Event day.
In order to get in, a person had to go through 5 different security checkpoints. Once in the main tent, a 7-foot high scanner checked your face, and the ticket was placed in a separate RFID scanner. If the light was green, you were good to go, if it was red, you were presumably put away somewhere. According to everyone we talked to, every single person got a green light.
Photos: liqiyuan/Flickr
See also:
