For Chinese athletes and those watching back home, the Paris Olympics is not just the ultimate sporting competition. It’s a stage for great power rivalry—with every Chinese success serving as evidence of faltering Western dominance.
“White superiority has collapsed!” reads a popular post on Weibo, after swimmer Pan Zhanle won gold in the men’s 100-m freestyle—breaking the world record he had previously set—and Zheng Qinwen became the first Chinese player to win gold in an Olympic tennis singles event.
Pan and Zheng have “jointly dug the grave for white supremacy,” the post declared, noting that swimming and tennis are typically the fortes of Europeans and Americans.
“The 100-m freestyle is like the crown jewel of swimming,” wrote another Weibo user. “The world record has been broken by a yellow-skinned person, so they [Americans] are really stung by it.”
And when the Chinese swimming team broke the U.S.’s 64-year reign over the men’s 4×100-m medley relay on Sunday, nationalists saw it as further confirmation of the end of U.S. domination across society.
“Pan Zhanle came out of nowhere, like Usain Bolt in the swi…