For our Olympic Wednesday entry today, we return to the United States as the city of Atlanta hosted the Summer Games. A whopping 10,339 athletes from 197 countries converged to compete in 271 medal events held across 36 disciplines. The Olympics were getting larger, and with the inclusion of “professional” athletes in many competitions, things were starting to get both fascinating and ridiculous at the same time.

The top countries should be familiar when looking at the medal counts: the United States (101), Germany (65), and the Russian Federation (63) led the way—followed by 20 other nations that won double-digit medals. These Games had it all: controversy, drama, heroes, and villains. Looking back now, the emergence of the Internet changed everything about broadcasting tape-delayed events to the television-watching world.

Most Outstanding Male Athlete: Aleksey Nemov, Russian Federation

Gymnast Aleksey Nemov of the Russian Federation won six total medals in Atlanta, including gold in the horse vault, silver in the individual all-around event, and three bronzes (floor exercise, horizontal bar, pommel horse). In addition, he was part of the Russian victory in the team all around. Interestingly, he would win six more medals in the 2000 Summer Games, but you’ll have to wait a few weeks for that one.

Most Outstanding Female Athlete: Amy Van Dyken, United States

American swimmer Amy Van Dyken was the only competitor in this olympiad to win four gold medals: 50m freestyle; 100m butterfly; 4x100m free relay; and 4x100m medley relay. She finished fourth in the 100m free, or else she would have added another medal to her count. However, her persona certainly rubbed some people the wrong way in subsequent years (see this incident in 2000), which is disappointing.

Most Outstanding Male Team: Chinese Table Tennis

The table tennis competitors from China cleaned up in Atlanta, with golds in both the singles and the doubles events, capped off with silver medals in both competitions as well. Liu Guoliang won the individual gold and then teamed with countryman Kong Linghui to win the gold in the doubles. Meanwhile, Wang Tao took silver in the singles and the doubles (with teammate Lu Lin). Perfect!

Most Outstanding Female Team: Chinese Table Tennis

While not quite as dominant as their male counterparts, the Chinese women still did pretty well in the table tennis events: gold (Deng Yaping) and bronze (Qiao Hong) in singles, to go along with gold (Yaping and Hong) and silver (Liu Wei and Qiao Yunping) in doubles. Yaping actually won both golds in 1992 as well, and Hong had won silver in singles that olympiad as well—in addition to gold with Yaping in doubles.