Beijing doubled its subway and pulled cars off roads for its 2008 Olympics
To stage its first Olympic Games, Beijing added seven subway lines and 80 stations, opened a vast new airport terminal and ordered drivers off the road on alternate days by licence-plate number. The August 2008 Games drew 3.5 billion viewers worldwide and ranked among the costliest ever staged.
Beijing won the right to host on 13 July 2001 at an IOC session in Moscow, beating Toronto, Paris, Istanbul and Osaka. It led comfortably after the first round, when Osaka collected only six votes, and secured a majority in the second. For Toronto it was a fifth failed Olympic bid. The Games ran from 8 to 24 August 2008, with 10,942 athletes from 204 national committees contesting 302 events in 28 sports; equestrian events went to Hong Kong and sailing to Qingdao.
The centrepiece was the National Stadium, nicknamed the Bird's Nest for its skeletal, woven look, where building work began on 24 December 2003. Norman Foster designed the airport's new Terminal 3. To clear the air, the city curbed construction sites and petrol stations, and from 20 July to 20 September barred cars on alternate days by the final digit of their plates, a measure expected to remove 45 percent of Beijing's 3.3 million cars. Organisers put spending at roughly that of Athens 2004, about 15 billion dollars, but other estimates reached 40 to 44 billion.
The emblem, Dancing Beijing, turned the character for capital into a running human figure, and the motto One World, One Dream was chosen from more than 210,000 entries. Many spectators and international papers called the opening ceremony the greatest in Olympic history, and the torch relay covered a record distance.
China topped the gold medal table with 48, becoming the seventh different nation to do so, while the United States won the most medals overall, 112. A record 87 countries took home at least one medal. Mongolia and Panama won their first golds, and Afghanistan and Togo their first medals of any kind. In 2022 Beijing added the Winter Games, becoming the first city to host both.
Source: 2008 Summer Olympics
