“Did China win The 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics? That’s impossible!”

The 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics has officially ended on Sunday, however, for George Mason students the Olympics are far from over. In such a diverse campus as ours, where people represent a lot of different nations, the question of who truly won the Olympics is expected to be one of the debates of the year.

So who won the Olympics? The People’s Republic of China or the United States? If we go by the international rule of counting the gold medals – almost every country in the world views the outcome of the Olympics from this perspective – then China had won the Olympics. China had received 51 gold medals while the United States received 36. If on the other hand we go by the overall count, then the United States had won by 110 medals over China’s 100. While the International Olympic Committee named China the winner by its 51 gold medals, it’s up to us to decide who won the games – it all depends which system we follow.

If we look into ourselves and decide that China had won, then in the Olympic spirit, let’s be fair and allow them to celebrate their victory without indulging ourselves in conspiracy theories about how they did it - let’s not follow in the footsteps of the media. The rest of the world does the same for the United States.

Nobody questions Michael Phelps’s amazing achievement, even though recently there was a fair amount of performance enhancing drug scandals in the United Sates – like World Champion Marion Jones’s case. Phelps is simply greater than any athlete in his field, because of his natural gift for swimming, rigorous preparation for the games, and a will that has no equal. End of story.

Sure, questions like, “Was gymnasts He Kexin, Yilin Yang and Linlin Deng under age?” or “Why did Fei Chang received third place on the vault after failing to land properly?” should be asked and addressed by the International Olympic Committee. Should we deprive China of their amazing overall achievements? No.

Let’s sum up the life of an average Chinese athlete, like the 15 year old Ruolin Chen, who had won two gold medals in diving at Beijing. She was born in 1992 in Jiangsu province, was recruited by the Chinese government’s sports division at the age of three, and she had been training with them ever since. In the past 12 years Chen was only allowed to see her parents three times a year, because her focus had to be on diving and nothing else. Similarly to Phelps, she had dedicated and given up her youth for a shot at glory. So does she deserve her gold? Yes!

Perhaps the reason why the United States lost – if you look at the winner from an international perspective – is because some of their athletes underperformed, which was nowhere as evident as in track and field.

What happened to Tyson Gay during the 100m dash was unfortunate, but what happened to the 4x100m woman and man relay teams was disastrous. Loosing the baton at the last 100m? Twice the same night? It’s unheard of! The United States didn’t lose a 4x100 men’s relay in the past 12 years, and now they did not only not get the gold, but they have been disqualified. American presence was also missing from any of the jumping events, which were more often then not, dominated by Americans.

Thus the fact that the 2008 Olympics was held in Beijing, and that the Chinese had won the medal count by international standards, has nothing to do with one another. It’s certainly not enough in and by itself to cast a shadow over the accomplishments of the Chinese athletes who prepared for this event for years. The Chinese were simply more prepared in some events than their American counterparts.

Then again, when Olympic gymnast Shawn Johnson has to pay for her training – her family almost went bankrupt in the process – while Chinese athletes are sponsored by their government, it’s reasonable to believe that China will have more world class athletes than America.

Regardless of our differing opinions of who won and how, we can all agree that the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics was simply amazing. We seen a great opening and closing ceremony, and then followed Phelps as he broke every record there was to break, while at the same time we tried to keep up with a Jamaican sprinter as he smiled his way to a world record in the 100m dash, and finally we were able to see a taekwondo referee being kicked in the face for his poor decision. What else could we ask for?

Let’s put our differences aside and celebrate the achievements of the athletes, after all, the Olympics are about them and their performances.