2008 Summer Olympics Parade of Nations


2008 Summer Olympics Parade of Nations was part of the opening ceremony that originating with the 1896 Olympic Games. The national team from each nation participating in the Olympic Games paraded behind their national flag into the Olympic Stadium. The flag bearer was an athlete of each national delegation chosen, to represent the athletes, either by the National Olympic Committee or by the national team.
Announcers in the stadium read off the names of the marching nations in French, English, and Mandarin Chinese with music accompanying the athletes as they marched into the stadium.
The Marshall Islands, Montenegro, and Tuvalu debuted at these Games, and Serbia competed under its name for the first time after the 1912 Summer Olympics. Montenegro and Serbia were previously one country as the State Union of Serbia and Montenegro.

Parade order

Per tradition, Greece entered first as the spiritual home of the Olympic Games, and the host country, China, entered last. All nations in between marched in the order of their names in Chinese, the host country's language.
As Chinese does not have an alphabetical order, the National Olympic Committees were sorted based on stroke count in Simplified Chinese characters. Specifically:
  • Characters with fewer strokes march earlier, so Australia marched before Zambia because wikt:澳 has 15 strokes and wikt:赞 has 16 strokes.
  • If the initial characters have the same number of strokes, then the stroke orders of the two characters are grouped in the order 橫竖撇捺折. For example, Yemen marched before Maldives because wikt:也 has three strokes in the order, while wikt:马 has three strokes in the order .
  • * Multiple Chinese sources reported that if the initial characters had the same number of strokes, the second characters would be used. However, this is inaccurate as Chad marched before Ghana because wikt:乍 is ordered in front of wikt:加.
  • If the stroke order groups are still the same, the initial characters tie and the second characters of each nation are used.
  • * Excluding identical characters, a tie only occurred once, with The Gambia and Benin. wikt:冈 has four strokes in the order, and wikt:贝 has four strokes in the order, so the second characters were used. wikt:比 has 4 strokes and wikt:宁 has 5 strokes, so The Gambia marched before Benin.
  • * Note that this differs from GB stroke-based order, which also uses the 橫竖撇捺折 system. Under GB stroke-based order, the comparison between ㇆ and ㇕ would have been the tiebreaker, with ㇕ ordering before ㇆ due to having fewer turns. This would have caused 贝 to be ordered before 冈 instead of the two characters tying, and Benin would have marched before The Gambia.
  • If the second characters still have the same number of strokes, then the stroke order groups are used again. For example, Djibouti marched before Kyrgyzstan because wikt:布 has five strokes in the order, while wikt:尔 has five strokes in the order .
  • If the third characters still have the same number of strokes, the stroke order groups are not used and it skips to the fourth character. Excluding identical characters, this only occurred once: the US Virgin Islands marched before American Samoa, since wikt:维 and wikt:萨 both have 11 strokes, ㇜ sorting behind ㇐ is ignored, and wikt:尔 sorts in front of wikt:摩.
  • * This did not occur during the 2022 Winter Olympics, with stroke order groups used throughout and American Samoa marched in front of the US Virgin Islands.
Two nations were ordered based on a different name:
  • Macedonia marched under its then-provisional designation "former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia", but was sorted under "Macedonia".
  • The United Arab Emirates marched under its short name in Chinese, but was sorted under its full name.
Three nations marched out of order:
Brunei was excluded from the Games by the IOC shortly before the Opening Ceremony as no athletes had been registered. One of the published lists of flag bearers was later edited to note this. Brunei athletes would have originally marched 36th between Uzbekistan and Barbados.

List

The following is a list of each country's flag bearer. The list is sorted by the sequence that each nation appeared in the parade of nations. The names are given in their official designations by the IOC, and the Chinese names follow their official designations by the Beijing Organizing Committee for the Olympic Games.
OrderNationChinese namePinyinFlag bearerSport
1Greece|2008 Summerlang\|zh|希腊translit|zh|Xīlàsortname|Ilias|Iliadis|dab=judoka