I’m at the Laoshan Velodrome to see Sarah Hammer in the women’s cycling individual pursuit qualifying.

And just now I was proud of myself for picking her parents out of the crowd, before racing begins. (OK, Sarah’s mother, Randi, looks a lot like her daughter, but still, there are a lot of non-Chinese here …)

We were chatting about The Mask Incident and Sarah’s surprisingly subpar performance on Friday …

And we got around to the flukiest thing I’ve heard all day:

Cliff and Randi Hammer are in China thanks to selling a piece of art … for $10,000.

Not just any piece of art. A piece of art they thought so little of they had it stashed in a hall closet. For years. Perhaps ever since Cliff’s uncle gave it to him.

It isn’t cheap to get to these Olympics. Figure $1,500-$2,000 per person in airfare, and factor in housing and tickets and food … and it’s daunting. It’s a big-ticket item.

Cliff and Randi were thinking about ways to raise money for the trip over here to see Sarah race … and they thought about that old painting in the closet.

“It was in the closet because we didn’t like it,” Cliff said. “It didn’t seem like anything special.”

As does so much art. But I digress.

So, Randi was poking around on eBay, getting ready to see what she could get for the painting (as well as some Ansel Adam photographs) … and she stumbled into the world of early California artist Percy Gray.

(He even has a wikipedia entry, here.)

Gray, an apparently significant “tonalist” painter (you tell me), is the person who did the painting in the Hammer’s closet. Something fairly ordinary, they thought, of a eucalyptus grove somewhere up in northern California. Its name? “Eucalyptus Grove,” the Hammers believe.

Randi decided, before putting the painting up for bid, to do some research … and she discovered that Percy Gray has become semi-famous and rather in-demand.

When she got around to putting it up for sale on eBay, the Hammers got three offers in the first 24 hours.  Eventually, they sold the painting for $10,000 to a Beverly Hills gallery.

So,  Cliff and Randi are spending a week-plus in Beijing because Sarah rides a bike really, really fast … and because that silly painting in the closet was the equaivalent of $10,000 they had stuck in a safe and forgotten about.