What is Chinese Taipei at the Olympics 2024?
Chinese Taipei will compete at the Olympic Games in 2024 – but what actually is it?
More than 10,000 athletes from over 200 countries will descend on Paris in 2024 for the world’s grandest sporting spectacle: the Olympics.
But eagle-eyed sports fans may have spotted a group of athletes competing under a flag and country name they didn’t recognise.
That’s because Chinese Taipei, abbreviated to TPE on scorecards and elsewhere at the Games, is the name under which athletes from Taiwan compete at the Olympics.
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Chinese Taipei’s all-time Olympic medal tally is 36, a historic 12 of which – including two of its seven golds – were won at the Tokyo Olympics in 2021.
With Taiwanese athletes competing in a range of sports in Paris, including the defending Olympic champions in women’s weightlifting and men’s badminton doubles, the nation will no doubt be hoping to add to that haul in what is its 11th consecutive Summer Olympics appearance.
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RadioTimes.com explains why athletes from Taiwan compete under the flag and name of Chinese Taipei at the Olympics and have done since 1984.
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Taiwan – officially known as the Republic of China – is an East Asian island nation that lies south-east of mainland China (officially the People’s Republic of China, or PRC).
Separated from mainland China by a narrow sliver of the Pacific Ocean called the Taiwan Strait, its capital city is Taipei, while the island’s population of over 23 million people puts it among the world’s most densely-populated countries.
In 1949, the Chinese Civil War resulted in the Republic of China, which had until then been the dominant power, being ousted from mainland China and relocating across the Strait to the island territory of Taiwan.
But despite that separation, the island has since been the subject of much dispute, with the PRC arguing that Taiwan is part of China, and that the island’s government is illegitimate.
Despite initially competing at the Olympics as the Republic of China, pressure from the PRC eventually led Taiwan to compromise back in 1981, when it was agreed with the International Olympic Committee (IOC) that it would compete under the name Chinese Taipei, as well as a new flag and anthem.
The 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles was therefore the first at which the new name was used.
The flag shows the Republic of China’s 'Blue Sky with a White Sun' emblem above the Olympics rings, encircled by a red, white and blue (the Taiwanese flag colours) five-petaled Prunus mei (Taiwan’s national flower).
At medal ceremonies, the National Flag Anthem of the Republic of China is also played instead of the National Anthem of the Republic of China.
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