Tiny nations enjoy extra buzz in Beijing

Arriving in Beijing was doubly daunting for weightlifter Itte Detenamo and his father because there are more people staying in the Olympic athletes' village than live in their entire country.

"We feel very small," said Vinson Detenamo, a 54-year-old hulk of a man who added his miniscule South Pacific island state of Nauru to the Olympics map as sports minister in 1994 and is accompanying his chunky son to his second Olympic Games.

Nauru has a population of 13,000, less than the roughly 16,000 people staying in the Beijing Olympic Village and a hundred thousand times smaller than China's population. An independent republic, Nauru is a 20 square kilometre (8 square mile) speck of an island that does not even have a capital.

"We have to explain to everyone where it is. It's a tiny dot in the Pacific, that's the best way to explain it," Detenamo told Reuters after Nauru's little-known flag was hoisted at a welcome ceremony in the Olympic Village. "But I'm very, very proud."

For small nations competing at the Olympics, the chances of walking off with a medal are tiny, but the buzz of just being there more than makes up for it, the athletes say.

"I feel so excited and happy and thrilled to be here representing our nation," gushed Alik Issac, heading the 2008 Olympic delegation from Micronesia, a vast cluster of South Pacific islands between Hawaii and Indonesia.

"Coming from a small country and participating in the Olympics - it's too much for us," he said.

Olympics veterans say the thrill grows as the Games have ballooned in recent years. With so many athletes around, it is more fun than ever to spot archers from the landlocked Himalayan state of Bhutan in the canteen queue behind US sprinters.

"It's much larger than it used to be," said Ecuador swimming trainer Jorge Delgado, 54, who competed for the medium-sized South American nation at the Munich Olympics in 1972 and Montreal in 1976.

"It's something very beautiful, all these nations getting together with the same objectives."

The biggest names at the Olympics tend to stay in flashy hotels, where they can rest and pamper themselves in style.

The Olympic Village, where the rooms are spanking new but basic, is where you are most likely to bump into somebody from nations like Barbados, a small Caribbean island.

Malta, also bracketed among the small nations in the Olympic family, will have six athletes competing in four different sport in Beijing. These are William Chetcuti (shooting), Charlene Attard and Nicolai Portelli (athletics), Ryan Gambin and Madeleine Scerri (swimming) and Marcon Bezzina (judo).