Beijing 2008 Olympic Games

athletic festival held in Beijing that took place August 8–24, 2008. The Beijing Games were the 26th occurrence of the modern Olympic Games. Some 200 Olympic committees sent almost 11,000 athletes to compete in 28 sports.

The Games were auspiciously scheduled to begin at 8:08 pm on the eighth day of the eighth month of 2008 in Beijing, capital of the world’s most populous country. (Eight is considered a lucky number in Chinese tradition.) From the time the International Olympic Committee (IOC) selected Beijing as the host city, on July 13, 2001, China invested huge sums of money in urban renewal, expanded infrastructure, and construction of Olympic facilities in Beijing and the six other Olympic venues (Qingdao, Hong Kong, Tianjin, Shanghai, Shenyang, and Qinhuangdao). In the months prior to August 8, a devastating earthquake in Sichuan province, international focus on China’s pollution problems, protests over China’s human rights record in Tibet, and criticism of the Chinese government’s control of information became part of the Olympics story. Nevertheless, China was determined to show the world, through an Olympics lens, that it had joined the ranks of the world’s most modern and influential countries.

The Games took place with few problems and were considered a great success by the IOC. The Beijing organizing committee earned high marks for the facilities that were constructed for the event, particularly the award-winning National Stadium (colloquially known as the Bird’s Nest), which was designed by noted Swiss architects Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, and the National Aquatics Center (known as the Water Cube), which was designed by China State Construction Engineering Corporation Ltd. (CSCEC) and architects Peddle Thorp Walker (PTW) with engineering by Arup. In contrast with these highly modern new designs, the cycling road race began near Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City and followed a route along the Great Wall.

The 2004 record (set by the Athens Games) for participating national Olympic committees (NOCs) was surpassed in 2008, with 204 NOCs represented in the Games. Almost 11,000 athletes competed in 302 events in 28 sports. Four countries had first-time medal wins—Afghanistan, Mauritius, Tajikistan, and Togo—and athletes from Mongolia, Panama, and India won their country’s first individual gold medals. New sports added to the Olympic Games included a 10-km marathon swim and bicycle motocross (BMX) racing.

The Beijing Games were dominated by two historic sporting feats. American swimmer Michael Phelps broke Mark Spitz’s record for most gold medals won in a single Olympics, taking the gold in each of the eight events in which he competed. Phelps’s eight golds brought his career total to 14, another Olympic record. While Phelps’s accomplishments would likely have been the biggest story in almost any other Olympiad, sprinter Usain Bolt of Jamaica earned his share of the spotlight by claiming the mantle of “the fastest man alive” in dramatic fashion. He not only took gold in both the 100-meter and 200-meter sprints (and captured a third gold medal as a member of Jamaica’s 4 × 100-meter relay team, although the medal was later stripped from the team after the 2017 revelation of a failed drug test by one of the team members), he did so while shattering the world record time for each event. Other notable moments of the Beijing Games included India’s Abhinav Bindra winning the men’s 10-meter air rifle event to capture the first individual gold medal in his country’s history and Mongolia’s Tuvshinbayar Naidan taking the men’s 100-kg judo event for the first gold of any kind in his country’s history. The Games were also a boon for the host country, as China won more gold medals in a single Olympiad (51) than any other country had since 1988.