Beijing 2008 Olympics 4

There were glories and disappointments as the Beijing Olympics was more than half way through. First of all, Michael Phelps must be the athlete that everyone's talking about since he was eight for eight, surpassing Mark Spitz by winning a record eight golds in one Olympics and breaking world records in seven of the eight events. Though he only broke the Olympics record in 100 m butterfly, it's widely considered the most dramatic victory by Phelps. Trailing by an arm-length in the last 5 meters, Phelps took another half-stroke in the final second and managed to outtouch his Czech opponent, Milorad Cavic, by one hundredth of a second. That race was just an instant classic and god knows how many people were watching miracle happening live in their tv sets. Phelps is 23 now and will be 27 in the next Olympics, and let's see if he could win more golds in London.


Usain Bolt is the newest fastest man of Earth as he won and broke world record in the 100 meters by 9.69 s. No one was even closed to him even though Bolt was slowing down while approaching the finish line and he still managed to beat the second-place runner by 0.2 s. Who knows if this guy could run into 9.6...


Yang Wei also won men's individual all-around and became the second Chinese gymnast to do so and broke his curse of "thousand-years-second-place." Though I think he was a little bit arrogant during the final leg of the competition as he had such a big lead over his opponents, it's still a great achievement since he won the gold at the age of 27.


Meanwhile, Nastia Luikin beat her teammate Shawn Johnson and won women's individual all-around. She was the second consecutive American gymnast to won this medal and completed the US domination in women gymnastics.


On the other hand, Liu Xiang dropped out of the men's 110m hurdles in the preliminary round. This was the biggest blow to China as 1.3 billion Chinese have been waiting for four years to see Liu repeating his gold medal performance in Beijing. However, Liu was clearly in distress and pain when he entered the stadium and during his warm up, and couldn't even cross a hurdle. I think Liu was courageous since he at least attempted to complete in the race. Though the outcome is disappointing, I wish Liu would get well and be healthy.


Heartbroken fans in tears... (Maybe the Chinese exaggerated this event too much as the US lost Terrence Trammell, too but it's not a really big news in here... I know Liu is the hero but there are other things that Chinese can cheer about in this Olympics!)