Standing in front of a backdrop of the Chicago skyline, U.S. first lady Michelle Obama speaks at a dinner in support Chicago hosting the 2016 Summer Olympics, Wednesday, Sept. 30, 2009, in Copenhagen.

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President Obama, on his way to Copenhagen tonight, to lobby for his town, Chicago, to get the Summer Olympics in 2016. Michelle Obama, already there. And Oprah. And Chicago Mayor Daley. And on, and on.

Tokyo’s in the running, with a prince and princess in town to lobby. Madrid, with the king of Spain.

But the smart money says the big challenger is Rio de Janeiro, out of booming Brazil. South America’s never had the Olympics. Rio wants it badly. So does Chicago. Mostly.

This hour, On Point: We’ll hear the cases they’re making. Chicago versus Rio, head to head, for the Olympics.

You can join the conversation. Tell us what you think — here on this page, on Twitter, and on Facebook.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Joining us from Copenhagen is Brian Cazeneuve, staff writer for Sports Illustrated. He wrote this week about “the pros and cons of each bid for the 2016 Olympics.”

Also from Copenhagen we’re joined by David Wallechinsky, Olympics scholar and Vice President of the International Society of Olympic Historians. He’s author of  “The Complete Book of the Summer Olympics” and “The Complete Book of the Winter Olympics.”

Joining us from Chicago is Laura Washington, columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times. See the Sun-Times’ coverage of the 2016 bid.

Joining us from Miami is Paulo Sotero, director of the Brazil Institute at the Woodrow Wilson Center International Center for Scholars. He spent 17 years as the Washington correspondent for Estado de Sao Paulo, a leading Brazilian newspaper.

On Point has spent a lot of time looking closely at China, from many angles, and as Tom noted today, we even took the show to Shanghai for a week in April. Now that we’re in the homestretch of these Beijing Games, you might be interested to listen back to some of those shows, and others we’ve produced in the past year, for a many-faceted view of China at this moment in its history.

Two of our Shanghai shows, in particular, stand out for me. In a show we called “Young China,” we talked with three Chinese students, two in Shanghai and one in Beijing, who gave us a full-throated, party-line perspective on their country that many were surprised to hear from mouths of students. No dissidents, these. (Later that week we spent an hour talking head-on about dissent in China with three top voices on the subject.)

And in our final show from Shanghai, we talked with two of China’s most distinguished scholars of U.S.-China relations about the way forward for these two great powers. A memorable hour. That show, and Tom’s parting thoughts from Shanghai, offered much food for further thought.

As always, there’s so much more to be said. We can never exhaust this topic. Curious to hear your thoughts about our China coverage overall, and how the rest of the media has presented China in the long runnup to these Olympics, as well as during the Games. I have a feeling we’ll all be chewing this over for a long time to come.

Olympic and Chinese flags fly near the portrait of Mao Zedong on Tiananmen Gate in Beijing, Aug. 6, 2008. (AP Photo/Greg Baker)

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What will we remember from the towering spectacle of the Beijing Olympic Games — about sport, about media coverage, about China?

From those massed drummers of the opening ceremony, to the eight medals on swimmer Michael Phelps, to the lightning speed of Jamaican Usain Bolt and Beijing’s eye-popping facilities, everything has seemed larger than life … except perhaps those tiny Chinese gymnasts.

China, NBC, and a whole lot of athletes wanted gold out of Beijing — and there’s a lot to go around. This hour, from sport to media to China’s bottom line, we’re scoring the Olympics.

Have you loved the Games, hated them, been riveted — or not? What image of sports, of China, will stick in your mind? And how about the way we’ve been shown, or not shown, the Games and the host nation by NBC and by China? How do you score these Olympics as a media event? What have you learned, or not learned, about China? You can join the conversation right here. Share your thoughts.

-Tom Ashbrook

Guests:

Joining us from London is Rob Gifford, NPR’s London bureau chief. He was NPR’s Beijing bureau chief for six years and is the author of “China Road: A Journey into the Future of a Rising Power.” He was last in China following the earthquakes in May.

From Washington, we’re joined by Paul Farhi. A staff writer for The Washington Post since 1988, he currently covers popular culture, the media, politics, and other subjects for the Post’s Style section and writes washingtonpost.com’s Olympics blog, “Playback: The Games on TV.”

And from Laurel, Maryland, we’re joined by David Steele, longtime sports columnist for The Baltimore Sun, Michael Phelps’ hometown paper.

Attendees at a hearing of the House Oversight Committee on Darfur and the Olympics, June 7, 2007 in Washington, DC. (Photo: Genocide Intervention Network)

It’s almost show time for the Olympic Games in Beijing.

China fought hard to get the games, and has spent at a level without precedent on preparations that have remade its capitol and wide swaths of the country.

For activists, the Olympics were a chance, when China was at its most sensitive, to push the country on Darfur, Tibet, human rights and its own legal system.

Now, with the opening ceremony in Beijing just days away, August 8th, we’re looking at where China has moved under that pressure. Where it hasn’t. And what may come next.

This hour, On Point: Olympic leverage and what it’s wrought with China in the homestretch to the Beijing Games.

-Tom Ashbrook

* * *

Guests:

Joining us from Beijing is Melinda Liu, Beijing bureau chief for Newsweek. She writes the “Countdown to Beijing” blog at Newsweek.com. She opened Newsweek’s Beijing Bureau in 1980 and is president of the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of China.

Joining us from Amherst, Massachusetts, is Eric Reeves. He has been at the center of a global campaign against China’s policy on Darfur and Sudan, labeling the Beijing Olympics the “Genocide Olympics.” He is author of “A Long Day’s Dying: Critical Moments in the Darfur Genocide.”

And joining us from New York is Jerome Cohen, one of the world’s top authorities on China’s legal system and Chinese human rights. He is a professor at New York University School of Law and a senior fellow for Asia Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations.

Tibetan exiles protested the Beijing Olympics torch rally and demanded Tibet's independence in New Delhi, India, on Thursday, April 17, 2008. (AP Photo/Gautam Singh)

Go to On Point in Shanghai: China’s Week in the News

Every week we hit the news on Friday. This week we do it from China. Things look different when you’re sitting in Shanghai. The pope’s visit to America? Invisible. The Dalai Lama in the U.S.? Big. CNN’s Jack Cafferty and his offhand taunt toward China? Huge. You wouldn’t believe the rumpus.

We’ve got Olympic politics, a once hot market in trouble, a party boss going down, and Tibet all over…

The Olympic flame burned though India, on a very short run in New Delhi (watch it on YouTube here).

CNN’s Jack Cafferty delivers a broadside China’s way — “I think they’re basically the same set of goons and thugs they have been for the past fifty years.” He says he was only going after the Chinese government.

Beijing hears it otherwise. Says he slandered the nation, and demands satisfaction: “We solemnly request CNN Cafferty to take back his malicious remarks and apologize to the Chinese people.”

This hour, a week in the news China-style, live from Shanghai.

What’s your top story this week — in the US? In China? In the world where they meet? What’s your take on China and the U.S. over the Olympics, hot tempers, trade, the Dalai Lama?

Guests:

Joining us from Beijing is Yang Rui, bigtime host of the daily English-language current-affairs show “Dialogue,” on China’s government-run television network, CCTV. It’s one of the top-rated shows on CCTV’s eleven channels in China. He is careful to say he is here not as a representative of CCTV or the Chinese government, but as an informed Chinese citizen.

With us from Hong Kong is Willy Lo-Lap Lam. He’s a longtime, top Hong Kong journalist who’s worked in senior positions with the South China Morning Post, Asia Week, and the Asia-Pacific headquarters of CNN. He is currently a Senior Fellow in the China Program at The Jamestown Foundation, a group that informs U.S. policymakers about parts of the world with media constraints—like China.

And with us in our studio in Shanghai is James Areddy, Shanghai correspondent for The Wall Street Journal. He is part of the WSJ team that won a Pulitzer Prize in 2007 for International Reporting on China.