PARIS – Wherever you look at the 2024 Paris Olympics, Americans are dominant. Team USA sent by far the largest number of athletes. Troops of tourists wearing American flags crossed the Atlantic. Celebrities like Snoop Dogg and Lady Gaga became cultural icons of the Games.
But there is one crucial metric that the United States has failed to reap from the competition: gold medals.
On the final day of the Games, China leads the medal table, with 39 golds to the United States’ 38. (While U.S. media typically counts medals totals, much of the rest of the world, including the official count for Paris 2024, bases its tally on gold won.)
While the U.S. team focused on track and field and swimming, China focused on diving, table tennis, weightlifting, shooting and badminton. In fact, about a fifth of China’s 302 gold medals since 1984 have come in diving. This year was no different, with China winning every available diving gold.
“I am very proud of China and all the gold medals it has won,” said Fang Zheng, 30, a Chinese student studying in France who was queuing to watch the parade on Friday. “When an athlete wins a gold medal, it is an honor for him and his family, but also for the country.”
This year, China is also making inroads in a discipline traditionally dominated by the United States: swimming. Among the two gold medals it won here was the 4x100m medley relay, the first time in Olympic history that any team has outscored the United States.
The star of the show was Pan Chanley, who edged out American Hunter Armstrong in the final leg, having already set a world record in the 100m freestyle five days earlier. The losing American team included 10-time Olympic medallist Caeleb Dressel, who had to settle for silver.
Meanwhile, Cheng Chenwen became the first Asian tennis player to win the women’s gold medal, and Chinese artistic swimming beat the United States and Spain. China’s “Light of Life” performance wowed judges by creating a physical representation of the “mountain” the team had to overcome to win gold. Despite longtime powerhouse Russia being disqualified from the Games, China produced a result that was beyond any competitor.
“Their execution was out of this world,” said Jacqueline Low of Team USA.
China has also been quick to embrace some new Olympic sports including sport climbing, skateboarding, surfing and snowboarding. Ding Yawen won gold in the women’s freestyle cycling event in her Olympic debut. China also has the youngest athlete at the Games, 11-year-old skater Zheng Haohao.
But China's newfound swimming prowess has not come without significant scrutiny, after 23 swimmers – including 11 who went to Paris – tested positive for banned heart drugs in 2021 but were still allowed to compete.
The Chinese doping agency said the athletes had eaten contaminated food, an explanation accepted by the World Anti-Doping Agency, which did not publicize the incident until it was revealed by The New York Times earlier this year.
China strongly denies the doping allegations, with a foreign ministry spokesman telling NBC News last month that “Chinese swimmers are clean and have never been afraid of tests.”
They also accused the United States Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) of double standards after it was revealed that the Americans allowed athletes who tested positive for doping between 2011 and 2014 to continue competing if they worked secretly to catch other doping users.
China has also focused on American runner Erion Knighton, who tested positive for the stimulant trenbolone in March but, like Chinese athletes, was cleared after his country's agency said he had eaten contaminated meat.
The current Olympic rivalry between the United States and China is part of a geopolitical sports monopoly that has existed since about 2004. Although the United States tends to win, when Beijing hosted the games in 2008 it swept the field with 51 gold medals to Team USA’s 36.
It's no secret how this is done, and it's very similar to what the United States and other countries do.
India has poured more and more funding into the Olympics, focusing on specific sports it knows will bring home a host of silverware. Having a population of 1.4 billion certainly doesn’t hurt, though as India will attest (it won no gold, one silver and five bronze in Paris this year), it has a huge pool of talent that is no guarantee of success.
The last time a shadowy one-party state accused of running a doping program competed with the United States on the medals table was the Soviet Union.
In those days of the Cold War, the Chinese Olympic program was still in its early stages.
After the Communist Revolution in 1949, Chinese leader Mao Zedong promoted exercise not only as a sporting necessity—to build a strong, healthy working class and defend the nation—but also as a cultural and political necessity. According to the Michigan-based nonprofit Asian Studies Association in its journal Education in Asia, it would “serve the political purpose of building a class of mentally and physically disciplined citizens.”
At the 1952 Helsinki Olympics, China realized the power of the Olympics as a geopolitical weapon. The Soviet Union had a tremendous success, surpassing the United States in the medal table and demonstrating “how a socialist state could defeat Western democracies on the world stage,” as an article in Education in Asia put it.
But China did not win its first medals for another 30 years, after withdrawing from the International Olympic Committee in protest at the participation of Taiwan, which it considers a renegade province rightfully belonging to Beijing.
The international sports stalemate began to thaw in the 1970s, first with the historic “table tennis diplomacy” of 1971, in which the U.S. table tennis team became the first international sports delegation to tour China in decades, paving the way for then-President Richard Nixon’s visit a year later. The trend accelerated in the late 1970s with the “reform and opening up” policies enacted by Deng Xiaoping after Mao’s death.
In 1984, China finally returned to the Los Angeles Games after an agreement with the International Olympic Committee that Taiwan would compete under the name “Chinese Taipei.” Beijing quickly became a medal machine, culminating in Beijing in 2008. This landmark event in the country’s modern history coincided with its rapid economic rise while the West suffered from the financial crisis that same year.
Amid fierce criticism, the IOC said the Games would help revolutionize politics and human rights in the world's then most populous nation. But that never happened.
Under President Xi Jinping, who took power four years later, China has become more authoritarian, according to Western governments and watchdogs, an assessment Beijing rejects.
Today, all countries see success at the Olympics as a way to project power internationally. But China takes this to a whole new level, where gold medals are not only seen as a symbol of national pride, but silver medals are often criticized on Chinese social media.
Meanwhile, China's State Council has pledged to make China “a leading modern socialist country in sports by 2050” and “its global influence in sports should rank first in the world.”
In this new era of competition between China and the West, more nationalist elements in the Chinese media are using the Olympics as a means to portray China in a positive light against the disloyal Americans and Europeans. The arguments about doping at the Games have only intensified this dynamic.
“The US’s use of its influence and hegemonic power to contain China and other competitors in sports is truly shameless and unsportsmanlike,” sports commentator Li Xiang told the hardline Global Times on Friday. On the other hand, Li said China “showed charm and sportsmanship in Paris, with young Chinese athletes winning friendship and respect from their competitors and foreign fans.”
