Olympics hostesses complete training

BEIJING, July 23 (Xinhua) -- Training of the 337 would-be hostesses for the Olympic victory ceremonies will end on Saturday, when the Chinese college beauties graduate from boot camp.

"I've always dreamed of being a guide hostess for the table tennis athletes at the Olympic venue," said Yang Xu, 19, one of the 300-odd young women selected from more than 5,000 candidates in Beijing and Shanghai colleges as part of the Olympic volunteers. Just like others, the slim, 170 cm tall Yang has been trained for three short terms with five kinds of courses, including body-shaping exercises, dancing, manners, ceremony processes and basic Olympic-related knowledge.

"It has been a tough job. We are often asked to keep a good-looking standing gesture on the standardized 5-centimeter-high heels for more than one hour, so that my T-shirt has been drenched with sweat even in the air-conditioned room," yang said. "Our teacher sometimes was seen taking a pack of broken heels for repair, a measure of our suffering," the young woman said with a bitter smile. The beauties had fought off furious competition to secure their chance to "enjoy the beautiful suffering" in the temporary "charm school", a vocational school in Beijing's northern Changping District.

The Beijing Organizing Committee for the Games of the 29th Olympiad (BOCOG) selected 297 beauties from a dozen Beijing colleges such as the Communication University of China, the University of International Relations, and Beijing Technology and Business University, said Wang Ning, deputy division chief of the Sport Representation and Victory Ceremony Division of the Culture and Ceremonies Department, BOCOG. The other 40 were selected from more than 1,700 candidates from Shanghai top-level universities, Wang added. All the girls were picked by experts from various professions, including models, body-shaping teachers, journalists, singers, dancers and athletes, based on specific standards of their body shapes and facial features, Wang said. A hostess needs to be a college student with good education background. She needs to be between 168 to 175 cm and good looking, which was specified in statistics of the sizes of bust, waist, hip and even mouth, nose, and eye, Wang said, but she refused to reveal the numbers.

"It was only a reference for the experts and some girls failing to accord with the size were also selected because of their beauty and passion," Wang said. Yang Xu said she had been in a selection process since last May. The previous rounds were done in her college, Beijing Yixian Professional Education Institute. "It is a chance, a god-given chance, to be more accurate, as China has been longing to host the Olympics for 100 years. I simply want to be part of it for the experience and to improve myself," Yang Xu said. Her feeling was exactly shared by many other women, including apair of 19-year-old twins named Li Ziye and Li Xiaoye.

The twins had always been eye-catching among the hundreds of beauties. They said they will probably be the hostesses for the first gold medal of the Games as athlete guides at a shooting venue. They had undergone a strict timetable from 6:30 a.m. to 11:00 p.m., regulating their life from getting up in the morning to falling asleep at night. They are scheduled to run in the morning and have classes all day until 8:30 p.m.. The training was hard work but there were lighter moments, said the elder sister Li Ziye. She said they were trained to smile with eight teeth exposed and look at the camera flashes without blinking. "We should not blink even if tears come out," Li Ziye said, with eyes opened wide.

"People always confused by us. I was always blamed by the teacher when my sister did something wrong. Some even thought there was a mirror when we were sitting face to face," the younger one Li Xiaoye said, chuckling. Many girls have made good friends during these days because of the shared experiences. "I've made many new friends here. They helped me a lot, which touched me sometimes deeply," Yang Xu said. "The victory ceremony will be the faces of China's Olympics as a necessary part of the Games," said Cai Fuchao, vice mayor of Beijing, at a start-up ceremony for volunteers on Sunday. The ceremonies had been designed with many traditional Chinese elements, the deputy division chief Wang Ning said.

The hostesses had been trained to be beauties both inside and outside, Wang said. The young women, with a classical Chinese temperament, would send messages of Chinese implicit beauty in each simple move as taught in the classes, she said. Their silk costumes were also designed with traditional Chinese cultural images such as blue-and-white porcelain, embroidery and jade. The ladies were not only beauties, but well-educated beauties, said Wang who had added classes like security, making-up skills and handling the media.

"All of them can communicate in English without any problem, and some even can speak other foreign languages such as Spanish," Wang said. They had all been arranged to each single post in every venue and each of them know her duties well. "We have labored so much, simply to give for a few minutes a good impression at the Olympic victory ceremony as we want to show the most beautiful aspect of oriental ladies across the world," said the twin sister Li Ziye, with a gentle smile.