Special report:   2008 Olympic Games

    NEW YORK, April 15 (Xinhua) -- China will not only put up a good Olympics but is a worthy host in the best tradition of the Games, the Wall Street Journal quoted a U.S. academic as saying Tuesday.

    "The moment is right for China to hold the games," Susan Brownell, an anthropologist at the University of Missouri, St. Louis, told the paper.

    Brownell, who speaks and reads Chinese and lived in China for several years, published her second book last February on China's sports system, called "Beijing's Games: What the Olympics Mean to China."

    The 47-year-old anthropologist, also a nationally ranked U.S. track-and-field athlete, said many Western criticisms of China are hypocritical or ignore the huge progress the country has made in many areas.

    "When you see the enthusiasm, the idealism and the faith in a better future and then you look at the perception abroad ... there is a disjuncture," the paper quoted Brownell as saying.

    Brownell competed in the 1980 and 1984 Olympic trials in the pentathlon and heptathlon but failed to make the U.S. national team. She went to China in 1985 as a graduate student and competed for a team comprised of Beijing athletes in the 1986 National College Games, winning a gold in the heptathlon and two silvers.

    She said participating in China made her realize that Chinese athletes are hardly different from those of other countries.

    "I got involved in figure skating in the U.S. and believe me, the children there are up at all hours practising, and the parents are pushing them, too," the paper quoted Brownell as saying.

    "When I see things like 'assembly line of pain' in the U.S. media to describe Chinese sports schools, I think it's ridiculous."

    She said that the people who write about Chinese sports know very little about China. "Most sports journalists are commentators and don't really investigate."

    Western reporters also assume that much is secret in China and use that as an excuse to make all sorts of claims or generalizations, Brownell said, citing the example of being recently asked by a reporter from a national U.S. magazine to use her contacts to get him a copy of China's policy on athletes' commercial endorsements.

    Rather than seek powerful sources, Brownell copied the necessary information from the Chinese sports authority's Internet site and emailed it to the reporter within half an hour.

    "People assume it's all secret in China but that's only because they can't read Chinese," she said.