China raise bar for London 2012

The Olympic flame is seen at the National Stadium during the closing ceremony of the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games on Sunday. The stadium is also known as the Bird's Nest. Photo/REUTERS

What you need to know:

  • Beijing was able to weather the storm and conclude a largely incident-free three weeks
  • The Olympic Village, where the athletes resided, was hailed as the best ever

Thanks to a massive workforce and overwhelming public support, Beijing on Sunday night concluded a most successful Olympic Games that raised the bar very high up for the next hosts, London.

Faced with massive criticism of the country’s human rights records and concerns over high levels of pollution in the Chinese capital, Beijing was able to weather the storm and conclude a largely incident-free three weeks of top draw sporting action that saw several world records broken on the playing fields and quite a number too off them.

The Beijing Olympics will also be seen as the cleanest as regards the use of performance enhancing substances although the jury is still out until Wednesday when the Beijing laboratory will finish analyzing all the samples from athletes who were tested in the August 8 to 24 Games.

“We have six positive cases now. If you look at the mathematical exploration from the number of cases in Sydney (2000) and Athens (2004), it will end up between 30 and 40 possible cases here,” said International Olympic Committee President Jacques Rogge.

“I’m glad to say that most of the athletes, the overwhelming majority, is clean but the small amount who cheat, unfortunately, tainted the whole sport.”

Athletes ejected

Ukrainian weightlifter Igor Razoronov, his compatriot, heptathlete Lyudmila Blonska, and Korean shooter Kim Jong-su were among the athletes ejected from the Olympic Village for violating anti-doping restrictions. The other offenders were Greek hurdler Fani Halkia, Spanish cyclist Isabel Moreno and Vietnamese gymnast Thi Ngan Thuong Do.

Doping aside, after last night’s spectacular closing ceremony, accolades will flow for the Beijing organisers in the coming days after they put up a great show that will be a hard act to follow by London who won the rights to host the 2012 Olympics.

World records, smooth transport and the ubiquitous smiling of the thousands of volunteers who helped to make the Games a great success will be complemented by athletes officials and journalists alike who were part of the competition.

Beijing’s venues were amazing with architectural marvels created at two of the main venues, the “Water Cube” swimming stadium and the main arena of the competitions, Beijing’s National Olympic Stadium, or the “Bird’s Nest.” The legacy plans for most of the Olympic venues is still not clear, though.

Venues

The Olympic Village, where the athletes resided, was hailed as the best ever while on the field, world records were commonplace and helped raise the profile of China’s competition venues and atmosphere that supported high performance with star acts such as that by Russia’s multiple pole vault record holder Yelena Isinbayeva, American swimmer Michael Phelps and Jamaica’s sprinter Usain Bolt leaving performances will remain most memorable.

With a dedicated “Olympic Lane” exclusively for vehicles involved in the Games, Beijing experienced no transport delays while public transportation was also not bogged down at all.

All the events started on time and all the weather-related delays were handled much to the satisfaction of athletes and spectators.

International pressure on China led to the country’s authorities easing up on their blackout of news reports on the BBC, CNN and other international channels seen to be unfavourable towards the Chinese administration.

By limiting the number of cars in Beijing and taking other stringent measures that included the closing down of several factories, the Beijing authorities also managed to arrest the problem of massive pollution that had threatened to take the Games away from