BEIJING - The sky had been gray every day for a week in Beijing, gray from smog and haze, so there was something comforting about the rain on Sunday morning. Those scorching and cloudless gray days felt eerie and wrong. The rain made sense.

That's the hard part of these Olympic Games in China, making sense of it all. There has never in the history of the world been a bigger collection of games with more people watching and more countries competing and more money changing hands.

And still, there has been an overpowering sense of order. This is at the heart of China. Order. Soldiers seem to be braced at attention along every street in Beijing. The whole city feels locked down in a way that is different from past Olympics and Super Bowls. You cannot walk anywhere, it seems without getting redirected or patted down.

Then on Saturday afternoon, in the heart of the city, by the ancient Drum Tower, a Chinese man with a knife killed Todd Bachman, the father-in-law of the United States men's volleyball coach Hugh McCutcheon, the father of 2004 Olympic volleyball player Elisabeth Bachman McCutcheon. The killer severely injured Bachman's wife Barbara and their Chinese tour guide. He then jumped to his death from the second story of the tower.

There's no way to make sense of this sort of tragedy, of course. Attacks on foreigners are almost unheard of in China. In the aftermath, there were only vague questions: How could this happen? Was this part of something larger? Was this a direct attack on Americans or a vicious but aimless attack? What was this all about?

With no real answers and only sketchy details coming in - he was a 47-year-old man, police suggested he had psychological problems, the early thought was that he acted alone - people kept falling back on a single word in the hopes of explaining what cannot be explained. They called the attack, "Random."

But this was precisely the thing. There was not supposed to be random here. The Chinese government had spent 40 billion dollars to outlaw random. They had flashing traffic signs in Tiananmen Square that read: "The police ask you: 'Smile.'" They played television commercials that prompted citizens to be good sports and to not put too much pressure on athletes. They outlawed spitting and wearing sandals without socks.

Nothing was going to go wrong. That was the government edict. That was the hope of so many hundreds of millions Chinese citizens who saw the Olympics as their chance, finally, to show the world their home.

And then, in one violent moment at the Drum Tower, built more than 700 years ago when Kublai Khan ruled China, all of that hope and control was shattered.

Of course, the Olympics go on. Barbara Bachman went through eight hours of surgery Saturday night and, at last report, was in stable condition. The men's volleyball team was set to play early Sunday afternoon without their coach. Nobody knows if McCutcheon will return to the team, but the U.S. Olympic teams intends to leave his coaching spot open, just in case.

Of course the Olympics go on. Sunday morning, American Michael Phelps demolished the world record in the 400-meter individual medley, an awe-inspiring performance that is what these Olympics are supposed to be about.

No, it isn't easy to make any sense of things. I remember being in Atlanta in 1996, there in the madness near Centennial Park after a bomb exploded and killed two, injured more than 100. There was this terrible feeling that it was all so pointless, all these sports, all these games, so pointless when you thought about how much pain is in the world. But then you remember that if you stop the games, you are only left with the pain.