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Clock ticking for Britain's Ben
By Matt Hodges (China Daily)
Updated: 2007-08-08 13:27
British diplomat Ben Ladd has what on paper sounds like an impossible mission: finding 1/1000s of a second in a city where time refuses to stand still.
The Beijing-based Olympic attach is one of the unsung heroes scrabbling behind the scenes to give Team GB's Olympic hopefuls every microscopic advantage possible when they arrive here for pre-Olympic training and then during the Games.
"The way it was put to me when I got the job," he said, "is that in Athens, there were five (of a total of nine) UK gold medals. If you add up all the times, and all the second-place times, the cumulative difference is 0.545 seconds.
"That half a second was the difference between five golds and five silvers, and so every little detail you can get absolutely perfect right off the bat gives you that extra 1000th of a second. My job is to help find those."
Runner Kelly Holmes (double Athens gold medalist), rower Matthew Pinsent, the men's 4x100m sprint team and cyclist Chris Hoy may not have credited Ladd's predecessor in Greece with any of their gold-medal success, but next year's winners may be dialing "00-86" (double '0' seven?) for a post-Games high five.
Now working furiously to slot in place the various cogs from Team GB for this month's pre-Olympic test events, such as the rowing and canoeing teams, Ladd said that being a diplomat is nothing like what you see in the movies. 
In fact, despite having worked to stop the spread of weapons of mass destruction, he doesn't even come close to James Bond, the British super spy, apart from some snappy one-liners. Were you always good at keeping secrets? "Oh, you'd better ask other people that," he said.
Ladd is married, for a start, and a Leicester City fan who proudly wears his stripes in front of the "telly". He is usually in bed by 11. And he has never exploited his diplomatic immunity.
He is also cricket mad. Britain is the reigning Olympic cricket champion, he points out. Even though the sport only featured in the 1900 Paris Games, it was allegedly won by a group of British embassy officials who did not know they were playing in the Olympics.
Ladd also checks the cricket scores before bed, rather than padding his mattress for booby traps a la Bond.
"I looked through this morning to see if the Indian bowlers had ripped through after Michael Vaughan got out," he said last Tuesday. "We're facing a defeat in the test quite early on today." There is a long pause. The expression on his face says: Is there no God?
Life must have been harder when he was chasing terrorists from his Westminster office.
Ladd, 31, an Oxford graduate who joined the Foreign Service 10 years ago and who recently returned to China after two years' working on the counter-proliferation of WMDs in London, says the new posting combines two deep passions in his life: China and sports.
He studied Mandarin for two years and is an avid fan of (again) Leicester and the Welsh rugby team. Upon learning that his British-French wife was pregnant five days after arriving in Beijing, he even dubbed his about-to-be-born son "Baby Olympus."
It could just be a coincidence that his favorite soccer player is also a Leicester boy, striker Gary Lineker, one of the most famous Premier Leaguers to ever play in Asia (he signed up with the Japanese league team Nagoya Grampus Eight from 1992-94).
The Olympic attach posting itself was incrementally built up to a two-year stint in anticipation of London hosting the 2012 Games.
"There's a huge amount more going on," he said. "The UK has five key objectives for next year, including maximizing sports performance, the handover next summer, and learning from how Beijing has used the Olympics in a broader social sense."
Will Beijing 2008 be a tough act to follow?
"You'll be surprised," he said. "Wait and see for the closing ceremony, the handover."
"I think it's just as (LOCOG Chairman) Seb Coe says: 'Beijing 2008 will be the best Games ever, and London 2012 will be the best Games ever'."
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