Gold: Liukin on the uneven bars. Photo: Mike Powell for NEWSWEEK

Yet on that day in Texas, my eye kept being drawn to a precocious 14-year-old who was working out along with Patterson. Later I asked one of the coaching assistants about her. She was the daughter of one of the gym owners, a former Soviet Olympic star, and the coach whispered that if I thought Patterson was good—and she was—this kid was destined to be something truly special. However she was still too young (except perhaps in China) to be eligible for the 2004 Olympic team. I was so impressed with the youngster's style that I returned to that Dallas-area gym three years later and profiled her for NEWSWEEK's year-end "Who's Next" special issue.

The young girl was, of course, Nastia Liukin and "next" turned out to be today in Beijing when Liukin soared majestically above the field and succeeded her gymmate Patterson as Olympic all-around champion. The victory came 20 years to the day that her father Valeri, who coaches her, lost the men's all around gold medal at the Seoul Olympics by just 1/10th of a point. "I hope I made up for that," she said. "I hope he enjoyed this as much as I did."

He clearly did, though he said he never dreamed that his daughter would do gymnastics—"it's so hard"—let alone follow in his Olympic footsteps. So too did everyone who witnessed her goose-bump evoking performance—including the Chinese fans who were first gracious and ultimately captivated as their own favorites finished third and sixth. After a decent score on her one pedestrian event, the vault, Liukin delivered a succession—on bars, on beam and finally, on floor—of dazzlingly complex and lyrical moves to win the gold medal by more than half a point over her teammate and defending world champion Shawn Johnson.

The promise that was so evident years ago was not fulfilled without a difficult struggle. Just before the magazine anointed her with that "who's next" (soccer's Freddy Adu and figure skater Sarah Hughes were earlier choices), she injured her ankle, the first of a long succession of nagging hurts that kept her off the mats or slightly sub-par on it. While she won a host of medals at world championships—four golds and five silvers—she slipped to fifth in the all-around at last year's worlds.

The new "it" girl was the diminutive Johnson, who won that competition and beat Liukin at both the 2008 nationals and the Olympic Trials. "It's not easy to be second," said her father. "But I believed she wasn't second. We made mistakes and we weren't ready." In the world of gymnastics, being ready means being able to repeat what you do every day in practice in the pressure-cooker that is Olympic competition. Liukin said her dad told her, 'Don't do anything better than you know how to do it. Just do it normal."

Johnson, 16, and Liukin, 18, are total contrasts in styles. The diminutive Johnson is bouncy and athletic and can light up an arena with her smile. Her performances are reminiscent of American stars like Mary Lou Retton and Kim Zmeskal and, appropriately, she wore fireplug red for the Olympic competition. Liukin is more reminiscent of some of the great Soviet and Romanian stars. While only 5'3", Nastia is lean and long-limbed and, in her pink, sometimes looks more ballerina than gymnast.

Johnson made no major mistakes and on many days, including some Olympics past, might have been good enough for gold. "I gave my heart and soul to the competition," she said afterwards. "Today was not my day. [Nastia] deserves that gold today." But all things being equal, elegance should always trump pzazz. "It has been a long journey, but every single moment has been worth it," said Liukin. "It's a dream come true. I couldn't be more thankful."

Tsinghua University professor Daniel A. Bell, watched the China-Angola basketball game with a crowd of patriotic Chinese spectators. His report:  

As a twelve-year-old boy, I took great pride in the fact that my home city, Montreal, was hosting the 1976 Olympics. It meant that Montreal was affirmed as a city of global importance. But it turned out to be, as scientists say, a false positive. The Canadian athletes did not do so well: for the first time in Olympic history, the host country did not win any gold medals. After the Olympics, the rise of the pro-independence movement led to an outflow of monolingual Anglophones and Montreal was soon replaced by Toronto as Canada's financial capital and largest city in terms of population. Today, Montreal is a cool, laid-back, bilingual city, but its glory days may be over. It's the kind of city that rarely gets mentioned on the CCN global weather report.  

A couple of days ago, I met a Danish student of physical education. He told me that Denmark had yet to win any medals in the Beijing Games, and I told him the same was true of Canada. We made a pact to support each other's teams unless they are in direct competition. But I told him I would also support China, my new home. It's also political: if China overtakes the U.S. in the gold medal race, it would be an appropriate symbol for a more desirable multi-polar political future, where no country has to power to invade another in the face of global opinion.

Yesterday was a chance to show my (new) patriotic colors. This time, I secured tickets via the elitist route—my wife's U.S.-based investment bank—for a basketball game between China and Angola. It was a must-win game for China, a loss would have resulted in elimination from the next round.

I arrived a couple of hours early with my son. It was pouring rain; the first security officer just waved us throw as I was digging through my bag looking for my ticket. We waited in line along with hundreds of others, almost exclusively Chinese. Student volunteers asked those with umbrellas to share space with the umbrellaless members of the community. I shared with a keen woman spectator from a Beijing suburb. The ever-practical Chinese also used flags for protection from the rain.

Finally they let us in, and we met my wife inside. To my surprise, she was wrapped in a giant Chinese flag. My wife is a graduate of Beijing University—perhaps the last bastion of liberal individualism in China—and normally criticizes my writings for eulogizing China and being overly critical of other countries. But she was cold and wet—and the flag also served the purpose of keeping her warm.

The audience was decked in red, with lots of flags. My wife took a picture of a plump baby with stickers of Chinese flags on his cheeks. One guy had a Kobe Bryant T-shirt with a "Zhongguo Jiayou!" (Go China!) banner on his forehead. Our section soon filled up with other Chinese patriots, including a humorous leader who led our chants.

The section below us was filled with celebrities like a winner of  the wildly popular Supergirl contest (the Chinese equivalent of "American Idol"), the CEO of Sohu (a leading Chinese language internet company) and a towering member of the 1984 Chinese women's basketball team (my son said he felt sorry for the person behind her).

We all rose for the national anthems. I usually get teary-eyed when I hear the Chinese anthem, because I first heard it when I fell in love with my wife in Oxford in May 1989, when we listened to student pro-democracy demonstrators sing along with the stirring music. We were shown on TV at the center of the arena, holding the flag, during the anthem. I was slightly embarrassed because I noticed that my hair was not combed properly.

During the warmup, the Chinese team engaged in collective exercises (warning: my son asked me not to write this because he doesn't think it's distinctive to the Chinese, but the Angolan team did not do collective exercises, so I'm leaving it in). China got off to a strong start, with a few assertive dunks by Yao Ming that he must have learned in the U.S.

Our cheering section jokingly competed with a cheering section from Angola at the other end of the arena. My neighbor booed when Angola took possession of the ball, but he also clapped when they made fancy baskets. Chinese cheerleaders came out during the time-outs—which was a clever strategy because some of the Angolan players could not resist peeking at them during the team huddle. China petered out, and it was a two point game after two quarters. We were very nervous.

At the start of the second half, a bunch of Western journalists came to our section and kicked out most of the Chinese patriots (they must have had seats higher up in the arena). It was very disappointing, I felt our sense of community under attack. Worse, several cheered against China, as though they wanted to check China's rise in the world of nations. It also struck me as breathtakingly rude: imagine if Chinese journalists were to cheer against the home team in a Western country in a game that didn't involve China. But I'm pleased to report an American journalist sitting behind me clapped loudly at Yao Ming's baskets and seemed just as swept along in the pro-China tide as me.

China did well in the second half and easily won the game, thus keeping their medal hopes alive. We were about to leave, but then one of the few remaining Chinese patriots in our section told us that our tickets entitled us to also watch the next game, between Russia and Lithuania. I jokingly asked him who we should cheer for, and he didn't seem sure of the answer. I said perhaps we should cheer for Russia, another big country with a great civilization that is recovering its former glory. But then I felt guilty, recalling that they had just invaded another country.

We went to get some snacks. I noticed another Chinese patriot who stayed behind, wearing a T-shirt  that said—in English!—"I love China ONLY". Perhaps she didn't understand the meaning of her T-shirt? Anyway, I decided to get some beer and forget about politics. Back inside, the Chinese patriots had put away their flags, I put away my notebook, and we enjoyed what turned out to be a thrilling game.

Duncan Hewitt reports on why Chinese are dissing their own soccer team:

The world might be quaking at China’s ever growing medals tally, but you wouldn’t have known it from recent front-page headlines in Chinese newspapers.  “Please forget about these Olympics”, implored Shanghai’s Oriental Morning Post. “Shameful failure”, proclaimed the city’s Youth Daily.  The cause of such despair?  The pointing finger of Brazilian soccer star Ronaldinho on the Youth Daily cover made it clear: the Chinese men’s soccer team had lost again, 3-0 to Brazil in their final group game, thus ending their hopes of qualifying for the Olympic quarter-finals.

Not that losing to the world’s most powerful soccer-playing nation—aided by a genuine, if somewhat out-of-form, superstar in Ronaldinho—is necessarily a matter for shame.  But Chinese fans on the internet were quick to suggest that the Brazilians had only played to 50% of their capacity, in part because they were concerned about not getting injured.  This points to the real source of the anger expressed by the Chinese press: China’s match against Belgium last Sunday—when it not only lost 2:0, but had two players sent off for crude and in one case dangerous challenges. The fact that one of them was Zheng Zhi—captain of the senior Chinese soccer team and a professional with Charlton Athletic in England, who had been drafted in to add experience and maturity—only added to the disappointment.

Internet commentary lit up with denunciations.  A posting that accused Zheng Zhi of killing Chinese soccer quickly got three hundred thousand hits.  One of China’s most famous sports writers announced he would never write about Chinese soccer again. Reaction to the Brazil-China result was predictably angry: "Please disband this team and don't waste the Chinese people's money on it any further" was a typical post on Sina.com.  Sports website Titan headlined the mock slogan: "Cherish Life, Stay Away from Chinese Football"; one of the options in its multiple-choice survey of reader’s suggestions following the defeat used a derisive pun on the Chinese word for "soccer": "national pigs, commit collective suicide!". 

The web was soon resounding with sarcastic new lyrics to the Olympic song "Beijing Welcomes You": “the Chinese football team welcomes you… our goal is always open, don’t be polite;… if you don’t score many today, we’ll let you make up for it next time.”

One thing I should note, to start, is that Beijingers aren’t accustomed to waiting out a four-hour rain delay to watch the once-bourgeois sport of tennis. So passions were stoked from the minute the action got under way. The night began with the bulk of the fans pulling for Roger Federer to the bitter end. He is the world's biggest tennis star and a well-known figure in Rolex-conscious Chinese circles. But you’d think a few more spectators might have rallied behind underdog American James Blake, who beat Federer for the first time in ten tries to advance to the semis. In the interest of anthropology for idiots, I asked a couple of Chinese fans if they thought anything should be made of their lack of enthusiasm for the African-American Blake. They didn’t, so I’ll let it rest there.

It probably wouldn’t have made much too difference where Venus Williams was from: her foe was China’s Li Na. Li pulled off a rousing upset, 7-5, 7-5, and the crowd set the tone for the trajectory of the match early. They crackled with excitement at nearly every ball off Li’s racket, and every service fault or unforced error off Venus’s. Venus did her best to take them out of the match. She dominated Li early on, smoking serves at 120 mph and searing groundstrokes Li couldn’t track down. But the crowd was an inexhaustible reserve of encouragement, pressing Li to fight back, and not always in the most Olympic of cadences. As Li was about go down 4-1, one spectator blurted in English: “Beat USA”. Then, in staccato, came another: “Beat USA”. And another: “Beat USA”.

Li Na proved as feisty as her multitude of backers, and Venus’s game unraveled quickly. Up a break, she double faulted. That’s when I heard a middle-aged couple nearby calling for her to do it again. Zai lai yi ge. “Another!” Every fault off Venus’s serve, “another.” When Li broke, the stands exploded. People waved tiny paper Chinese flags and waggled full-sized nylon ones. They roared “Li Na, Jia you”, or “Go Li Na”. Which to Western ears might have sounded like “Go Venus.” Not that Venus was under any illusions.

The Portuguese umpire was tested in the art of diplomacy. To shush the crowd before points, he initially took to uttering a singular courtesy phrase, Xie Xie: “Thank you.” His pronounced it fine, too, but the foreigner’s local touch set off a giggly buzz.

By now we were coming up on midnight, and this crowd could not contain themselves. Venus served the crucial ninth game of the first set, knotted at 4-4, and it went to deuce several times. Fault One from Venus prompted more calls for “Another!” On Li’s returns, hoots of hao qiu—“good ball!”—reverberated around the stadium. The umpire had to break in: “Ladies and gentlemen, please do not cry out during play. Thank you.” Venus won the game without ever complaining, but she didn’t seem to be a happy camper either. (Neither, perhaps, was her sister Serena, who was getting bounced of the Games by Elena Dementieva on another court).

As the players switched sides, a pre-recorded message played in Chinese, French, and English: “Ladies and gentlemen, in the spirit of the Olympics please do applaud errors made by the athletes. And as a courtesy to the athletes, please maintain silence [during the action].” Spectators were also requested to remain seated except during the changeover. Which proved an awful lot to ask of the pumped-up Chinese fans. But the organizers did what they could to entertain. In the next game Li broke serve again, which set her up to serve out the set. A Chinese R&B track played, people clapped to the beat, then Li closed out the set. Later they would play a ska rendition of “You Are My Sunshine”, cut by the seminal Beijing punk band Reflector.

On a few occasions my ears picked up individual Chinese fans hollering “Kill It” as Li wound up for a smash. At 4-4 in the second set, shouts of “Go Li Na” rang out just as Venus was about to serve. But the catcalling and mean-spiritedness only occurred in isolated in patches. When the reigning Wimbledon champ walloped a running volley for a winner, people applauded appreciatively. Afterward, Li commended the crowd. “Wow, I don’t think you could see that in another country.” The mad zeal for Li didn’t really translate into anti-American hostility—more like a patent disregard for tennis P.C. The only time the crowd did shut up was when Li was serving at match point. Even then the stands vibrated. “SHHHH!”