Jeff Brooke writes for The Globe and Mail about looming issue of Beijing’s notorious poor air quality and its effect on Olympic athletes in the 2008 Olympiad. Beijing’s air is essentially toxic and there is a permanent brown cloud that hangs in the air, which gets worse in the summer with the humidity.

They [Chinese officials] say they will do their best to curtail, and even eliminate, the dirty air by shutting down or moving factories, switching to more environmentally friendly power and limiting automobile use. It’s not an empty promise. They did it before with some success — at the Asian Games in 1990, for example.

Sun Weijia of the Beijing Organizing Committee for the Games of the XXIX Olympiad, informally known as BOCOG, acknowledged the city’s poor air quality, but said it will be taken care of.

“We just move it,” he answered when asked recently about the belching factories in the city and area.