By Kane Wu
PARIS (Reuters) – China delivered their best performance at a Summer Olympics since the 2008 Games on home soil, winning the joint most gold medals with the United States and only missing out on topping the standings on silver medal count.
The 40 golds was an all time high for Games outside China and was achieved despite immense pressure and tightened scrutiny resulting from a doping row involving some of its swimmers.
Chinese athletes strengthened their dominance in diving and table tennis with clean sweeps of all the titles on offer, adding two golds on the badminton court, five on the weightlifting platform and five at the shooting range.
Breakthroughs were made with first gold medals in artistic swimming, rhythmic gymnastics, women’s boxing and in singles tennis.
Zheng Qinwen, 21, backed up her status and one of the best young talents in women’s tennis by winning the singles gold at Roland Garros after a few hardfought wins, including one against world number one Iga Swiatek.
The run-up to the Games was clouded by reports in the New York Times and German broadcaster ARD in April that 23 Chinese swimmers had tested positive for a performance-enhancing drug in 2021 but been allowed to compete at the Tokyo Olympics.
China’s Foreign Ministry accused the United States of using the case, which doping authorities concluded was caused by contamination, to undermine the Chinese swimmers in Paris.
Pan Zhanle, 20, emerged as China’s biggest star in the pool with a scorching swim to break the world record in the blue riband 100 metres freestyle.
Pan, who spoke candidly about being cold shouldered by other swimmers, also led China to end U.S. dominance in the men’s 4×100 medley relay.
Zhang Yufei, one of the 11 swimmers named in the ARD report, won six medals for a career tally of 10 to become China’s most decorated Olympic swimmer.
“We are innocent,” Zhang said. “World Aquatics and other parties have already got to the bottom of everything and clarified online. If some people still don’t believe it, we are not going to refute any more in vain, because innocence will prevail.”
Away from the pool, China also claimed medals in some of the more recent additions to the Olympic programme, including a gold in women’s BMX freestyle, two silvers in sport climbing and a bronze in the women’s breaking in a total team tally of 91 medals.
(Reporting by Kane Wu; Editing by Alison Williams)
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