With plenty of tickets to the Wheelchair Rugby still available -  they're a steal at RMB 30 each -  we decided to re-run this article from the September issue of the Beijinger magazine. The competiton runs from Sep 12-16 at Beijing Science & Technology University Gymnasium with the Canadian and US teams going head to head on Sep 14.

When it comes to dynamic-sounding names for a sport, few can match the term Murderball, the original name for Wheelchair Rugby (or Quad Rugby as it's known in the United States). The sport is coming to Beijing this September as an event in the Paralympic Games, and starting Friday, September 12, Beijingers will get the chance to see first hand why the sport wholly deserves its traditional violent epithet. As soon as the opening whistle sounds and you witness the athletes smashing chairs, the game will ride roughshod over any preconceptions you may have about the wheelchair-bound.

Wheelchair Rugby was developed in Canada in the late 1970s. At the time Wheelchair Basketball was the most popular team-sport for wheelchair users, but its reliance on upper body mobility was a turn off to the majority of quadriplegic athletes, who suffer functional impairments to the upper and lower limbs. As a combination of wheelchair basketball and ice hockey, the sport offers quadriplegic athletes the chance to play in both offensive and defensive roles. Played on a basketball court with a volleyball, the aim of the game is to score points by carrying the ball over the line in between the opponents goalposts. The sport shares little resemblance with traditional rugby except for its name and a full contact nature that often unseats participants from their wheelchairs.

French rider Anne-Caroline Chausson made history this morning when she became the first person to ever win Olympic gold in the BMX. Going into the last turn Chausson was neck and neck with race favorite Shanaze Read of Great Britain, but when Read tried to pass on the inside, she clipped the back wheel of the French rider and crashed out of the race. Chausson's team mate Laetitia le Corguille avoided Read to nab the silver and American Jill Kintner finished third.

Come the Games, come the parties. They dubbed it the "No-fun Olympics,” but after waking up this morning with a couple of snow leopards, a mariachi band and a Cadillac parked in my front room, I beg to differ. Beijing is awash with parties, events and more beer than I can get my clammy little hands on – no wonder there are so many empty seats at the Olympic venues. But before my liver quits and I’m lost to an August of indignity and iniquity, I’ll give you an update of the goings on and ongoings at some of Beijing’s hottest Olympic party spots. Well, two of Beijing's hottest party spots – The Heineken House and Club Bud. These two places have two things in common: a hop-based beverage and location. But other than this, they're very different venues.

Weren't in town for round one? Thought you skip the rigmarole of round two and just buy direct in round three? Get caught on a page that never finished loading during stage three? Only find out about round four when it was too late? Whatever the cause, you now have to endure countless conversations revolving around who's got what and are forced to listen as friends and colleagues brag about that great game of beach volleyball they watched last night or how they're really looking forward to watching the 110m hurdles live. To add salt to the wound, when you watch the games on TV you see hundreds of empty seats smiling mockingly at you from the screen! No matter how it came about, if you've found yourself in the Olympic city without a ticket and you still want to see some events, keep reading below for some tips of how to get close to the action:

Standing eerily still and in machine-like formation over square tables, the army of thousands assembled before us portended something big. From one angle, they resembled angry youth, standing at attention before their school desks. Another interpretation might imagine them as factory workers listening attentively to morning loudspeakers before getting down to work. And then there is the obvious comparison with the theatrical image of soldiers lined up in uniform that has become shorthand for the Chinese government.

But this wasn't about that China, at least not overtly. This was about a China of the past and the future, a China transcending a half-century of difficulties to reach backwards and forwards at once. It's a China defined by a sense of tradition and a capacity for innovation in the arts and sciences - a far cry from the reputation China has for, say, mass politics, rote learning, knock-offs and copy-paste manufacturing.

"I've never seen a country spend so much time showing itself off," a Chinese friend mentioned after watching the ceremony. She made a comparison to North Korea's Mass Games. "But I guess we have a lot to show."

Indeed it's a history and culture that remains unknown to most Westerners, and, as many Chinese will remind you, goes back 5,000 years. Of course, because successive dynasties interspersed with drastic upheavals, that number's not completely accurate. But that didn't stop director Zhang Yimou from attempting to pack it all in to a typically epic, spectacular ceremony.