Reflecting on what remains after the flame goes out

Editor's note: July 13 marks the 25th anniversary of Beijing's successful bid to host the 2008 Olympic Games. In a conversation with China Daily journalist Li Wei, Professor Angela J. Schneider, director of the International Centre for Olympic Studies at Western University and the first director of Ethics and Education for the World Anti-Doping Agency, and Zhou Guanpeng, a research associate at the center, reflect on the legacy that remains after the Olympic flame is extinguished. Through the lenses of sport, technology, sustainability and human well-being, they examine how the Beijing Olympics have continued to shape society and the public imagination nearly two decades later.

Li Wei: What do you remember most about the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games?

Zhou: When I think about the twenty-five years since Beijing won its Olympic bid in 2001, I return to several images from the 2008 opening ceremony. Firework footprints moved along Beijing's Central Axis toward the Bird's Nest. Then an ancient sundial appeared. A sundial: the shadow of the sun. It makes time visible by reading the shadow cast by light.

Perhaps Olympic legacy works in the same way. The visible light is easy to see: venues, ceremonies, medals, technology, global attention. The harder question is: After the flame goes out, what truly remains, and whose life does it change?

Schneider: Legacy is not only what still stands after the Games. It is what continues to serve human beings. In my work, I distinguish between performance excellence and human excellence.

The first asks: how fast, how high, how strong? The second asks: what kind of person, community and life does sport help us cultivate? If we take that distinction seriously, Olympic legacy cannot be measured only by buildings, spectacle or records. We must also ask about human legacy: whom do these achievements still serve? Do they serve athletes and citizens, or only a spectacle that has already passed?

Zhou: The children who watched the fireworks in 2008 may now be parents. Venues once belonging to champions may now belong to students, walkers, skaters and families. More than a century ago, Chairman Mao Zedong warned in A Study of Physical Education that sport could have "form without substance".

He did not treat the body as an accessory to the spirit, but as the ground of knowledge, will and moral life. When we speak of Olympic legacy today, do we face a similar question: Is sport merely a ceremony or spectacle to be watched, or a practice people actually live?

Schneider: I would add to that question. Participation is not only a matter of numbers. A crowded venue does not necessarily mean a meaningful sporting culture. We must ask whether people enter the internal goods of sport: the joy of learning skill, the discipline of sustained practice, the confidence formed through effort, and the experience of testing oneself with others under fair conditions. When sport enters daily life in this way, it is no longer only leisure. It becomes part of a fuller human life. Such a legacy is not static. It has to be used, practiced and understood again.

Li Wei: If Olympic legacy is ultimately measured by how deeply sport enters everyday life, how should we judge whether a host city has succeeded? Is it enough that venues remain open, or must they also become part of people's daily habits and social relationships?

Zhou: That brings us to another question: are we building smarter Olympics, or wiser ones? The scroll sequence in the 2008 opening ceremony offers at least one clue. Painting, writing, dance and music were not separate performances. The body was writing, the ink was dancing, movement became image.

Ancient form and modern technology appeared in the same scene. The point did not seem to be that technology betrays nature.

It seemed to ask whether technology can remain fitting to the body, to rhythm and to meaning. From your perspective, how should technology in sport be judged?

Schneider: I would not begin by asking whether technology is natural or unnatural. That often misleads us, because "nature" is not, by itself, a clear ethical standard. I would ask: what does the technology serve?

If it makes sport safer, fairer and more accessible, reduces waste, and helps more people participate, it can deepen sport.

But if it turns athletes into performance machines, spectators into data consumers, and venues into monuments no longer belonging to city life, it weakens sport. A truly sustainable Olympics is not only more efficient environmentally. It must also be ethically accountable to human beings.

Zhou: So sustainability is not only an engineering problem. Beijing has many visible examples of venue reuse, but a deeper question is whether these spaces have returned to public life. If venues and technologies merely prove that a city is stronger, faster and better organized, they may be smart. If they help ordinary people keep moving, meeting, learning and recovering bodily life, they may become wise.

Schneider: Yes. The Olympic movement is based on a public trust. It does not belong only to committees, sponsors or host cities.

It also belongs to athletes, citizens and future generations. A sustainable venue is one that returns to public life. A sustainable technology supports meaningful effort rather than replacing it. A sustainable Olympic city is not merely more spectacular. It is more fit for better human life.

Public trust means that Olympic legacy must remain open to public judgment: does it give people more chances to move, to meet, and to understand themselves and others through sport?

Li Wei: The third question may be the deepest: when the world is faced with so many challenges, what can the Olympic Games still hold together?

Zhou: In the movable-type sequence, the performers evoked the ideals of "friends coming from afar" and "all within the four seas are brothers and sisters". Then the blocks formed the character he, harmony. Finally, the blocks opened, and people appeared from underneath and waved.

That harmony was not produced by machinery alone. It was coordinated human movement. It seemed to resonate with the Olympic ideal: not erasing difference, but forming shared practice within difference.

Schneider: That is important. What sport gives to ideals is practice.

Harmony in sport is not the absence of conflict. Competition itself is conflict under shared constraints. Fair play, as I understand it, is not merely following rules or being polite. It is respect for the game.

Respect for the game changes how we see opponents. An opponent is not an enemy to be eliminated, but a necessary partner in the pursuit of excellent sport. Without a worthy opponent, one cannot truly test oneself.

Zhou: Then harmony is not sameness, but coordination within difference. It does not imagine a world without conflict. It asks conflict to enter rules, limits and mutual recognition.

Schneider: Yes. Two athletes may come from divided countries, speak different languages and carry different histories. Yet in competition they can recognize one another through shared rules.

That recognition is limited, but it is real. It cannot solve geopolitics, but it can teach a disciplined way of living with others and the world. The value of the Olympic Games is not that they make the world suddenly agree. It is that they allow people, while difference remains, to enter a practice shaped by rules, respect and effort.

Zhou: So the twenty-fifth anniversary of Beijing's successful bid should not be only a memory of success. It should become a question: after the ceremony ends, can the city, its venues, its technologies and its citizens continue to practice this deeper legacy?

Schneider: That is the key question. If we must name it, since 1993 I have called it the "spirit of sport" which is based on the internal goods that create the joy of sport.

But I would not use that phrase as a slogan. It means skill, fair challenge, meaningful effort, respect for opponents, and the cultivation of a fuller human life. Beijing's most lasting Olympic legacy will not be measured only by buildings that still stand, but by what still moves: bodies, habits, public spaces, shared memory, and the continuing possibility that competition can become a practice of human flourishing.

The light once illuminated a city; the shadow tells us whether that light still gives direction to human life.

The views don't necessarily reflect those of China Daily.