Joes Map

Tonight was the last competition for the men and women gymnists in Beijing, China. There has been some controversy surrounding the games this year, specifically in gymnastics, but I don’t care about that. What I care about is who won the gold?

So without further ado, the medal standings. In the Men’s Individual All-Around competition, the gold went to Wei Yang of China. The silver was awarded to Kohei Uchimura of Japan, and bronze was placed on the neck of Benoit Caranobe of France. What an upset for America! There is good news though, we placed third in the Men’s Team Competition. China won gold and Japan came in second.

The women fared a little better in their team competition, where China took gold, the USA won sliver, and Romania beat out Russia for the bronze. The best part, of the Women’s All-Around competition, tonight was what the media is calling the one-two punch from Nastia Lukin and Shawn Johnson. Both of these women are from the United States, Nastia took gold and Shawn won the silver medal. China’s Yilin Yang stood in third place on the podium while The Star-Spangled Banner played.

Go USA!

The Olympics are in Beijing, China this year and no matter what you think of politics, they put on an amazing show for the opening ceremonies. I did not get to see the whole thing but I did get to see most of it. I think my favorite part was when they brought out 2,008 Tai Chi masters doing forms in unison. Also, there was a bit where a large group of people carried a very beautiful woman on a platform they were holding up. Not only did this woman balance on the platform, she was dancing! That’s what I call grace.

The biggest achievement of all, in my opinion, was when they had a large number of people under multi-layered boxes that extended when they stood up. They created a visual feast for the eyes as the boxes formed waves and Chinese characters from their language. Apparently, the performers had been working eight hours days for 4 months before the ceremony. For the last few days leading up to the ceremony they worked even longer hours. The really interesting part is that they did not have a perfect performance until the ceremony itself. Talk about Olympic Gold!