And so it begins. There are 11,000 athletes from 204 countries competing for 1,000 medals in 28 sports over 16 days. The heady mix of power politics, freedom campaigns, human rights issues and environmental concern will impossibly segue into a festival of running and jumping and throwing stuff. The other issues will not go away, and they certainly will not be forgotten, but the joys of leaping about and winning and losing will also come before us. At last.

It is the world’s love of sport that has forced all those other issues into our consciousness, repeatedly bringing China to the point of anger and despair. The world refuses to take China at its own valuation: nor should it. But now, at least, we can have some Games.

They won’t solve the problems of the world, nor will they make them much worse. What they will do is provide a festival of humanity: glorious, futile, triumphant, noble, disastrous, noble, fraudulent heroes and villains of many colours, beliefs, incomes and hopes in all the ineffable biodiversity of the species.

Such a thing was celebrated with spectacle, incoherence, prettiness and cliché as the opening ceremony beamed its way across the world to billions. It began at eight o’clock on the eighth of the eighth, 2008, and as the cloud of smog – or, as the Chinese call it, water vapour – sat over the stadium and the temperature inside it soared, you wondered if a less auspicious date in a cooler and less humid month mightn’t have been a bad idea. A pretty superstition has overridden common sense and run rampant.

But no matter. Let the drummers drum and the dancers dance, let the fancy lights flicker and then swing the cute little girl about on the end of a wire: for this was an opening ceremony and all these rituals must be observed before we are allowed to watch the sport. It was all terribly symbolic, though I can’t offhand say what it symbolised. The greatness of China and the inevitability of world peace, I suppose.

Well, half of that is unquestionably true, and if it took 15,153 costumes in 47 styles with 110 minutes of specially composed music and 13 months of rehearsal – it is a host’s privilege to boggle the world with the perfectly choreographed official version of itself. After that we deserve a bit of sport. The rain kept off, and so did the Free Tibet protesters. At least some of the prayers have been answered: maybe this stifling day was not entirely inauspicious after all. In such circumstances, you start off wanting to put on the finest show that the world has ever seen, but by the time you are ready to start, all you want is it to be over and all well.

The city was fizzing with paranoia all day, the sky abuzz with helicopters, with police and soldiers everywhere – one estimate said that there were 110,000 policemen bussed in to the capital to help out; there were only 91,000 people in the stadium. Just about everywhere around the stadium was cordoned off with do-not-cross-this-line. I know, I crossed several on my way to lunch.

But the show ran smoothly, and then the athletes entered the stadium, in an order worked by an impenetrable piece of Chinese logic, and on they marched, some with mock-military discipline, others all over the place, as many walks as there were nations and races and religions. The Brits passed by in their winewaiters’ jackets and then, at the last, carrying the flag of his nation, came the outrageously equivocal figure of Yao Ming, a 7ft 6in Chinese basketball superstar who plies his trade for the Houston Rockets.

At the last, Li Ning, the triple gold-medal-winning gymnast, took the Olympic torch, flew skywards and took it on a lap of honour around the top rim of the stadium on flywires and, in one last rather splendid coup de stade, lit the torch that will burn here for the next 16 days. And so the sport begins.

These are the Games of billions – the people in the country staging them and the yuan they cost to do so. Those of us here will celebrate the unofficial version of China, the one they didn’t show in the ceremony: the place of millions of young people in the throes of changing a society more or less by accident, simply by getting on with the business of life and the business of business and doing so without taking any ideology with overmuch seriousness.

Bring it on: it starts today.