Beijing 2008 Olympics 7

Today (8/24) is the last day of the Beijing Olympics. The closing ceremony started with courtdown again and fireworks forming the shape of Arabic numerals. Drums were also used again but there were not that many performers this time. It's then followed by the entrance of flags and athletes. Next, it's the marathon victory ceremony and it must be great to be the winner of that event as the athlete celebrated in front of millions people around the world. Then it came to the not-so-exciting parts when flowers were presented to the organizers and addresses were delivered. The flag of Britain was raised, and the Olympic flag was lower and presented to the major of London. It's time for British to perform and a red double-decker bus, which was obviously the symbol of London, entered the stadium. Though I've heard this performance cost nearly 200 million (I don't know what currency...), the results were not spectacular to me. Performers were dancing around the bus and at some point, the bus transformed into a stage once its top opened up (welcome the latest member of the transformers...). Then some artists performed on that stage, and David Beckham also appeared on that bus and kicked a ball into the crowd (though it didn't reach far enough to the audience and it's different from I've been imagining: his trademark free kick). After that, some foreigners walked up a boarding ladder and looked at the Olympic torch as the flame slowly extinguished. Though the fire was gone, hundreds of performers simulated the flame with their bodies in the center of the field. I think that's the best part of the whole ceremony, and in the end some ribbons extended towards the sky from the top and formed something like a tree. Then artists from China, Taiwan and Hong Kong took the stage and sang a few songs to conclude the ceremony (Jackie Chan, Andy Lau, Joey Yung, Wakin Chau, etc. could finally be the star turn of a ceremony, not while the audience were leaving in the opening ceremony...)

China has been leading in the gold medal court since day one and in order to save the face of the US, American newspapers and networks has created an unorthodox way to count the medals in the Olympics by emphasizing the total number of all three medals instead of the number of golds. As a result, the US would be ahead of China in overall by ten (110 vs 100). Horay! The US of A thought they won even though they were behind 15 in the gold race (36 vs 51). God bless America and I hope people are not blind.

Medal Count

Another way to deceive the public is to put the bronze count to the left so it appears that the US has won more medals than China and Russia. That's really nice... more bronze than any other countries! I'm speechless.