On August 9, or last Saturday, the first day of Beijing's 2008 Summer Olympics, reigning gold medalist Du Li of China was the favorite, but ended with the fifth. (She won the women's 10m air rifle with a score of 502 points at the Athens Olympic Games in 2004.). She, therefore, sobbed bitterly for it, and a woman reporter aroused pity and had a sobbing tone too. And some spectators reportedly left the arena with looks of despair on their faces before the medal award ceremony.

In the following day, China's Ren Jie, the world record holder in women's 10-meter air pistol final, failed to qualify for the final. If Guo Wenjun could not take the gold in the event, she, too, would have felt extremely sad and choked with grief.

In fact, this is precisely where the charisma of athletic sports rests with. So, it is neither possible to run no risks at all nor easy to make predictions. "Great (gold) medals" may get lost, and "Black horses" often fight their ways out unexpectedly on a slant.

To the Olympic Games, China was once a great "black horse" as a matter of course. Reminiscing the distant past, who cared for or attached importance to Liu Changchun, a true hero and the first-ever athlete China sent to compete in the Los Angeles Olympic Games in 1932?

Afterward, China detached itself from the Olympic Games and turned disappointed for several decades. Apart from the Table Tennis Game and a very few conspicuous event items to be striking to the eyes of people, which did not necessarily make outsiders nervous or uneasy. China could indeed be termed as a "blackest horse" during that period, when it only loitered around beyond the Olympic arena without the least ability to gallop forward.

Xu Haifeng on July 29, 1984 won the first Olympic gold medal in the 50-meter pistol event at the 23rd Olympic at Los Angeles Games. Since then, Chinese athletes have begun picking gold medals one after another. To date, sports fans or Olympic enthusiasts have intented, with "wide ambitions and high aspirations," to calculate in mind the total number of gold medals China would gain in the ongoing Olympic Games.

A few individual spectators lost hope in woman athlete Du Li, and it is not merely owed to the loss of the first gold medal for their country at the Beijing Games but because they had already calculated in mind the total number of medals China to obtain in the Games, and this gold medal had long been enlisted into the medal tally. "There will be a hope (for ceiling the gold tally) with the haul of thee medals a day,"according to the accounts some netizens settled in the Internet Web forum.

Consequently, some websites overlooked and even ignored a silver medal of men's 400m of men's 400m free style swimming won by Zhang Lin last Saturday. But as a matter of fact, this was China's first medal in the event and it is indeed much more valuable and precious than a gold medal.

How can the joy in sport games be said to belong to gold medalists alone? And how can be that sliver medals and even a status to the fifth place are not worth mentioning and be counted as failures? With such a mindset, how can people really understand to enjoy or appreciate the charisma of sports?

Defending gold medalist Nurcan Taylan of Turkey, the 2004 Athens Olympic champion, was eliminated after three failed attempts in the snatch. Feeling neither painful or resentment, she kissed passionately the left side weight discs on her barbell before waving to the crowd on the way out. At that movement, she smiled with a sense of joy.

The host nation of the Olympics does not consider that gold medalists alone are winners at each Olympic Games. The genuine Olympic spirit is not necessarily the wording "Faster, Higher and Stronger" that one frequently heard and can always repeat. And in line with the authoritative annotation of the "Olympic Charter", what we should promote is the authentic Olympic of "mutual understanding, friendship, unity and fair competition".

In the arena of athletic sports, China has undergone a long period of "black horse", during which it had been overlooked and looked down upon. When this black horse is so pitch-dark today and gold medals are not so rare, then how we should regard the gold medals and how we look at the "firsts"?

If an ephemeral or tansitional "splendidness" or brilliance in sports arena has filled the nation solemnly with an illusion or misconception of a "sports power" to cover up the true situation that "ours is still a weak nation" and so this misconception is simply a self-deception.

Yes, indeed, China has become increasingly "bullish" with athletic games. In the field of sports for nationals, nevertheless, it still has great disparities with advanced developed countries in the realm of national physical culture. Breakdowns in 2006 show that the nation merely had an average per-capita share of 1.03 square meters of sports ground in the year (and the figure was only 0.65 sq m in 1995). Despite some progress it has so far scored, it cannot be compared to genuine "sports powers", and in the case of the most proximate neighbor of Japan, there is a per capita share of sports ground, which is 10 times as much in China.

In a nutshell, if China will once again be a "black horse" emerging from obscurity in a countrywide body-building endeavor, its significance to the nation's rejuvenation is far greater than a "peculiar show" in the athletic sports.

Therefore, athletes or viewers alike should regard gold medals and their rise in the medal tally with a usual, imperturbable state of mind, so as to appreciate and enjoy the Olympic Games and sports at ease and with much relaxation.

By People's Daily Online and its author PD reporter Li Hongbing