Despite amassing a truly impressive collection of Olympic gold medals, host China doesn’t seem to have gotten off the starting block on freedom of expression, despite its pre-Games assurances to the rest of the world. The world is noticing.

“We are disappointed that China has not used the occasion of the Olympics to demonstrate greater tolerance and openness,” U.S. embassy spokeswoman Susan Stevenson told a Voice of America reporter.

As part of its pre-Games planning, the Chinese government designated three Beijing parks for protests during the Olympics, but those venues went unused.

“There is a fact that there were 77 applications …. We found it unusual that none of these applications have come through with protest,” Jacques Rogge, chairman of the International Olympic Committee (IOC), told reporters in a post-Olympics news conference in Beijing Sunday.

He said Chinese authorities told the IOC most questions raised by the protest applicants had been addressed by “mutual agreement.”

Especially harsh criticism is coming from the Paris-based press freedom group Reporters without Borders, which called China’s performance on free expression an “Olympic disaster” in which authorities prevented journalists and bloggers from covering protests or any other subject the government deemed sensitive.

“As we feared, the Beijing Olympic games have been a period conducive to arrests, convictions, censorship, surveillance and harassment of more than 100 journalists, bloggers and dissidents,” Robert Ménard, the organization’s secretary-general, said. “This repression will be remembered as one of the defining characteristics of the Beijing games.”

Acts of repression cited by the organization included 22 foreign journalists attacked, arrested or obstructed during the games; at least 50 Beijing-based human rights activists placed under house arrest, harassed or forced to leave; at least 15 Chinese citizens arrested for requesting permission to demonstrate; dozens, including the blogger Zhou “Zola” Shuguang and the handicapped petitioner Chen Xiujuan, physically prevented by police from traveling to Beijing; and at least 47 pro-Tibet activists, mostly from Students for a Free Tibet, arrested in Beijing.

Many had hoped the Olympics would crack open the door to greater freedom of expression in China. Some are finding that crack as tiny as a sprinter’s margin of victory.