PARIS — Every way you looked at the Paris 2024 Olympics, America was dominating: The U.S. team sent the most athletes by a wide margin, hordes of flag-draped tourists descended from across the Atlantic, and celebrities like Snoop Dogg and Lady Gaga became the games’ cultural icons.
But there is one key metric in which the U.S. has fallen short against its competitors: gold medals.
When all competition was over, China tied the US team with 40 gold medals. (US news outlets typically report results based on total medal count, while most other countries in the world, including the official Paris 2024 count, report results based on gold medal count.)
While the U.S. team focuses on track and field and swimming, China focuses on diving, table tennis, weightlifting, shooting and badminton. In fact, about one-fifth of China’s 302 gold medals since 1984 have come from diving. This year was no exception, as China won every available gold medal in diving.
“I’m so proud of China and all the gold medals it has won,” said Fan Zheng, 30, a Chinese student studying in France who was waiting in line to watch the results on Friday. “When an athlete wins a gold medal, it’s an honor not only for him and his family, but also for the country.”
Chen Yiwen was one of China’s overall winners in the diving competition. Oli Scarf/AFP – Getty Images
China also made strides this year in events where the U.S. dominates, particularly swimming, where China won two gold medals, including the 4×100-meter medley, beating the U.S. for the first time in Olympic history.
The star of the show was Pan Jiangre, who outshone American Hunter Armstrong in the anchor leg – he had already set the world record in the 100m freestyle five days earlier – and the losing US team also included 10-time Olympic medalist Caleb Dressel, who had to settle for silver.
Meanwhile, Zheng Qinwen became the first Asian athlete to win a gold medal in women’s tennis, and China’s artistic swimming scores blew away both the United States and Spain. China’s routine, “Light of Life,” awed the judges with a physical representation of the “mountain” the team had to overcome to win the gold medal. Russia, long the dominant force in the sport, was excluded from the competition, but China still achieved a score far superior to any of its competitors.
“Their performance was just phenomenal,” said Jacqueline Lu of the U.S. team.
China has also been an early adopter of some of the new Olympic events, including sport climbing, skateboarding, surfing and breaking. Deng Yawen won gold in women’s BMX freestyle in her Olympic debut. China also has the youngest athlete in these Olympics, 11-year-old skater Zheng Haohao.
But China’s newfound prowess in the pool has not come without intense scrutiny after it emerged that 23 swimmers, including 11 who competed in Paris in 2021, had tested positive for banned heart medication but were allowed to compete.
China’s doping agency said the athletes had eaten tainted food, an explanation accepted by the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA), which did not make the incident public until it was uncovered by a New York Times investigation this year.
China has strongly denied the doping allegations, with a foreign ministry spokesman telling NBC News last month that “Chinese swimmers are clean and have never feared testing.”
Table tennis has long been the domain of Chinese players such as Fan Zhendong, Ma Long and Wang Chuqin. Standing on the podium after winning the men’s team gold medal in Paris. Lintao Zhang/Getty Images
He also accused the United States Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) of double standards after it was revealed that between 2011 and 2014 it had allowed athletes who tested positive for doping to continue competing if they had conducted undercover investigations to catch other dopers.
China is also keeping an eye on American sprinter Elyon Knighton, who tested positive for the performance-enhancing drug trenbolone in March but was cleared after Chinese authorities said he, like the Chinese athletes, had eaten tainted meat.
The current Olympic rivalry between the United States and China is part of a geopolitical sports duopoly that has been going on since about 2004. The U.S. tends to win, but when Beijing hosted the Olympics in 2008, the U.S. won 51 gold medals to the U.S. team’s 36.
How it’s done is no secret, and in many ways is similar to what the United States and other countries do.
While India is pumping more money than ever into the Olympics, it is also focusing on certain sports where it knows the most laurels will come. Having a population of 1.4 billion certainly doesn’t hurt, but as India has proven (no gold medals, one silver and five bronze medals at this year’s Paris Games), even a huge pool of potential talent doesn’t guarantee success.
The last time an opaque one-party state accused of running a doping program matched the United States in medal wins was the Soviet Union.
During the Cold War, China’s Olympic program was still in its infancy.
China’s Sun Mengya and Xu Shixiao win gold in the women’s canoe 500m final. Lindsay Wasson/AP
After the 1949 Communist revolution, Chinese leader Mao Zedong promoted exercise not just as an athletic imperative to build a strong, healthy working class and defend the nation, but also as a cultural and political necessity. According to Education About Asia, the journal of the Michigan-based nonprofit Asian Studies Association, exercise “serves the political purpose of building a national class that is well-trained in body and mind.”
And at the 1952 Helsinki Games, China saw how the Olympics could become a powerful geopolitical weapon: The Soviet Union’s huge success, nearly catching up with the United States in medals, demonstrated that “socialist countries could outdo Western democracies on the world stage,” according to a paper in Education About Asia.
But it took another 30 years for Taiwan to win its first medal, as China considers Taiwan a rogue province that rightfully belongs to Beijing and it withdrew from the International Olympic Committee (IOC) in protest.
The slump in international sports exchanges began to lift in the 1970s, starting with the historic “ping-pong diplomacy” of 1971, when the US table tennis team became the first international sports delegation to visit China in decades, which led to a visit by President Richard Nixon the following year. This trend was further accelerated in the late 1970s with the “reform and opening up” policies implemented by Deng Xiaoping after the death of Mao Zedong.
China finally returned to the Los Angeles Games in 1984, following an IOC agreement that Taiwan would compete under the name “Chinese Taipei.” Beijing quickly became a medal-winning machine, culminating in the 2008 Beijing Games. This landmark in China’s modern history coincided with China’s rapid economic growth at a time when the West was suffering from a financial crisis that same year.
Li Fabin won gold in the men’s 61kg category. Miguel Medina/AFP – Getty Images
Amid fierce criticism, the IOC said these Olympics would revolutionize politics and human rights in what was then the world’s most populous country. But those words never came to fruition.
Western governments and watchdog groups say China has become more authoritarian under President Xi Jinping, who took power four years ago, though Beijing denies such assessments.
Today, every country sees Olympic success as a way to demonstrate their strength internationally, but China has taken it to a whole new level, where not only is a gold medal seen as a symbol of nationalistic pride, but a silver medal is frequently denounced on social media.
Meanwhile, the State Council has vowed to make China “a modern, sports-leading socialist country by 2050” and declared that “China’s global influence in sports should become world-class.”
And in this new era of Sino-West rivalry, the more nationalistic elements of Chinese media are using the Olympics to portray China in a favorable light vis-à-vis a disloyal United States and Europe. The doping controversy at this year’s Olympics has only intensified this dynamic.
“It is truly shameful and unsportsmanlike for the United States to use its hegemonic influence and power to contain China and other competitors in the sporting world,” sports commentator Li Xiang told the hardline Global Times on Friday. Meanwhile, China “displayed charm and sportsmanship in Paris, and its young athletes won the friendship and respect of rivals and overseas spectators.”
