Can you imagine having been an Olympic athlete and competing in Beijing in 2008? The news made it clear that China’s campaign to eliminate smog did not work as well as anyone would have liked. After all, the one thing that wasn’t clear in any shots of the Beijing skies was the air.

Smog is a mixture of pollutants with ground-level ozone as the main component. The ozone is created through the action of sunlight on hydrocarbons and nitrogen compounds in the air. Many of these nasty chemicals are the result of industrial manufacturing. So the problem with smog isn’t just ozone: it’s also the whole cocktail of lung-burning compounds including fine particulate matter (like you get from gas-burning cars, diesel vehicles, and coal-burning electrical plants).

According to a recent study published in Allergy, an increasing proportion of Olympic athletes have asthma, allergies or both. This is not a consequence of being an athlete; it parallels the increase in these conditions in the general population of the industrialized countries. However, the treatment of asthma in particular is complicated because exercise alone can trigger it, even without bad air or allergies.

For athletes with allergies or asthma who competed in Beijing, management was the key. Asthmatic athletes had to be ready for the worst effects from the Beijing air. Based on the high number of new world records set in all sorts of events, from swimming (through the unbelievable 8 medal win of Michael Phelps) to pole vaulting (with the Russian female athlete Yelena Isinbayeva breaking her own previous best) to running (via the astonishing lightning speed of Usain Bolt), clearly the athletes came ready.

You have to keep in mind that asthma is nothing to sneeze at either. An asthma attack can be lethal. In fact, some sport experts were predicting the possibility that an athlete could die at Beijing.

It’s a shame that China couldn’t deliver on the promise of good air. Despite the extraordinary measures taken, air pollution continues to be a major problem in Beijing. In fact, China spent 120 billion yuan ($17.58 billion U.S. dollars) preparing for the Olympics to little avail. So, it’s not that China didn’t throw everything it’s got to get pollution down; it’s more like too little too late in a country with a bloated system of mass production that has never valued the health and safety of its own people.

Long distance runners and swimmers were expected to suffer the most. We’ll still have to see if endurance athletes end up with any lasting problems post Olympics. So far, so good.

The concern about Beijing’s air during the Games motivated many countries to screen their athletes very carefully. In the end, such screening revealed individuals who had asthma and didn’t realize it! Those athletes were then able to take the steps to have drug treatments approved by the Olympic committee before they ever hit a starting line. This may have contributed to the great overall performance of athletes, despite the difficult conditions.

Which brings me to my next thought: perhaps next time the Olympic committee decides on a location for this once in 4 years event, it should also consider the health of the athletes and not just the exotic locale, or the chance to rehabilitate a national citizen. While we will likely see some interesting research and new knowledge on how to manage allergies and asthma in top athletes exposed to bad air, is this really what the Olympics are about?