Category — China

Chinese athletes do rule weightlifting, no? They grabbed eight of the 11 gold medals awarded so far. Here’s China’s Lu Yong celebrating after winning gold medal number 24 for China. Lu tied with Andrei Rybakou of Belarus as both lifted 394 kilos but he was awarded the gold because he registered a lighter body weight during the weigh-in.

Armenia’s Tigran Varban Martirosyan won the bronze medal for this event (weightlifting, 85 kg category).

Photo credit: gettyimages via beijing2008

China’s gold medal count remained stuck at 22 for much of Day 7 but this has now gone up to 23 following the victory of Cao Lei in women’s weightlifting (75 kg category). She bested Alla Vazhenina of Kazakhstan who got the silver and Russian Nadezda Evstyukhina who settled for the bronze.

For those of you interested in the China vs. US race for gold medals, it currently stands at: China (23 golds) vs. U.S. (14 golds).

Photo source: xinhua via beijing2008

China crashed the U.S./Australia party in the swimming pool when Liu Zige won the gold medal in the women’s 200m butterfly with a world record swim of 2:04.18.

Should Americans be concerned that Chinese athletes are encroaching in their territory, the medal-rich sport of swimming? They need not worry now but they should worry in future editions of the Games.

Swimming is the main source of U.S. medals [seven of its current ten gold medals are from swimming] so it would be interesting to see what happens if China challenges the U.S. dominance of the sport.

Photo source: xinhua/beijing2008

Hah. Didn’t I tell you earlier that the art of medal biting lives on in the Olympics? Here’s the China’s synchronized divers Kai Qin and Wang Feng. Kai is biting his gold to test if it is authentic.

Seems like the Chinese divers are really going to win all the golds in diving, no?

Photo source: Nick Laham/Beijing2008

Apologies for not blogging about the most recent Olympic results particularly the one we care most about, i.e., the race for gold medals between China and the United States. I must admit to being discouraged after I discovered that my blog posts were being stolen. This sapped my enthusiasm to blog. But now that the problem is fixed [the webmaster behind the site agreed to not republish my contents after I contacted him/her and his/her host], let’s continue having fun.

At the end of Day Four of the competitions, China has 13 gold medals while the United States has seven. China appears to be on its way to bagging the number of medals that some crystal ball gazers predicted. In particular Luciano Barra predicted that China will win 38 gold medals while researchers at the Sheffield Hallam University predicted that the host nation will win 46 Olympic gold medals.

Meanwhile, Barra predicted that the United States will win 47 golds; so the Americans have to bag 40 more golds which they can very well do given that we’re still only on the fifth day of the Games. I’m not sure if the Sheffield Hallam folks made a prediction for how many medals U.S. athletes will bring home.

Anyways, as a sort of recap, here’s a listing of the gold medalist from both countries. I hoped to make individual entries for each of them but, as I said earlier, I was derailed by some baddies who, to their credit, responded favorably to my request.

Chinese Gold Medalists [end of day four]
Weightlifting
LONG Qingquan – Men’s 56kg
ZHANG Xiangxiang – Men’s 62kg
LIAO Hui – Men’s 69kg
CHEN Xiexia – Women’s 48kg
CHEN Yanqing – Women’s 58kg

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