The 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing have come and gone, providing us with entertainment, victory, heartbreak, lashings of good old national fervour and some respite from the depths of winter.

Beijing 2008 has been lauded as one of our finest Olympic efforts. The team came home with nine medals - placing us 26th overall. But we ranked 5th in medals table on a per-capita basis. Our congratulations go to those triumphant Kiwis who contributed to the best medal haul of the last two decades. Let’s take a look at just some of the other records that were broken in Beijing:

- A record 182 New Zealanders competed at the Beijing Olympics this year.
- We witnessed “Super Saturday” – our most successful single day at the Olympics, ever. We won five medals on that exhilirating day (the previous best was four bronze medals at Seoul in 1988).
- Valerie Vili won the first gold medal in the field since Yvette Williams managed it in 1952.
- Nick Willis won the first Olympic medal in the glamour 1500m event since John Walker’s triumph in 1976.
- The Evers-Swindell twins now join Peter Snell, Mark Todd and Ian Ferguson and Paul MacDonald as the only New Zealanders who’ve won gold in successive Olympics.
- No less than 10 New Zealand records were broken in the swimming at the Water Cube.
- Rower Hamish Bond has been named as New Zealand’s 1000th Olympian.

To find out more about the inspiring story of New Zealanders at the Olympics over the last 100 years, check out www.NZHistory.net.nz. Don’t forget to take the Olympic quiz – it’s truly addictive and you can test your knowledge of our great Olympic moments.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 25th, 2008 at 7:04 pm and is filed under Events, Your stories, National identity. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.