Xu, in retrospect, initially didn't know it as the first gold medal of the country. "Until a reporter told me that all the newspapers in Beijing were sold out. My scalp tingled," he said.

At that year, Fang Fengdi watched the Olympic Games on the television with her four-year-old son together, whose name is Yao Ming, a later household name of the country.

At that year, the nine-year-old girl from northeast China Yang Yang started her ice skating training. "I want to be the same as Xu and Lang when I grow up," she said then.

The Olympic successes, along with China's rising economy, have instilled new confidence to the Chinese people to host an Olympic Games.

Beijing lost its first bid in 1993 to host the 2000 Olympics. Eight years later in 2001, the IOC awarded the 2008 Olympic Games to the Chinese capital.

"The eight years witnessed a great leap in economic development and social progress. The great change impressed a lot of IOC members. I believed we really had a shot this time," Wei Jizhong, a then top Chinese Olympic official, recalled in his book My Sports Career.

"The Olympic Movement would not amount to anything without China," said the then IOC president Juan Samaranch, who announced the decision that the IOC opted Beijing

Yang Yang, who grew up to be the leading athlete of short track speed skating then, was on a train when Beijing won the bid. "The whole train erupted into a sea of happiness."

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