China's massive medal haul at the London Games has once again showcased
the country's ability to produce champions through its rigid Soviet-style
sports regime, but national pride has been tempered by concerns about the human
costs of sporting glory.
Chinese bloggers expressed their
disgust last week after a Shanghai newspaper reported that the parents of
Olympic diver Wu Minxia had concealed her mother's long battle with breast
cancer for fear of disturbing her training.
Wu, 26, who was also shielded
from news of her grandparents' deaths, shrugged off the controversy to win both
the sychronised and individual three-metre springboard events in London.
"It's not only Chinese
athletes who are like this. Parents seldom come to our training base and we are
just like a big family who all train together," Wu said after winning the
individual title on Sunday.
"There may be distance from
our families but the distance doesn't make us feel we are far apart. I chose to
be a diver to pursue this goal."
While the fall of Communism in
Europe in the 1980s and 1990s put paid to the command-and-control systems that
turned the Soviet Union and East Germany into sporting superpowers, China's
"juguo tizhi" - literally 'whole nation system' - remains as
entrenched as ever.
Like Wu, the greater majority of
China's 396 Olympians have started their sports at tender ages, sacrificed
their childhoods for the state and drawn their emotional support from team
mates, coaches and officials, in lieu of family members and friends.
The relationship remains strong
between the athletes and the state that nurtured them, and fairytale stories
abound of Chinese children wrenched from poverty and enriched by success on the
global stage.
But the Olympic medals have
obscured the more unsavoury aspects of the sports regime, which has been blamed
for leaving less successful athletes uneducated and ill-equipped to thrive
outside the competition venues.
Abuse accusations
It has also drawn criticism from
Western coaches who have accused their Chinese counterparts of producing
winners through systematic physical abuse.
"You wonder why the Chinese
women are so successful? Most of the men are coaches. The women are literally
beaten into submission," Johannah Doecke, diving coach at the Indiana
University-Purdue University Indianapolis in the United States, told Reuters.
"If you said no to anything,
you would be chastised, slapped around. It's a brutal system."
Doecke trained one of China's
elite divers in Chen Ni, who rose to a provincial grade before migrating to the
U.S. at the age of 19.
Doecke describes Chen as someone
who was terrified of making a mistake when she first came under her
instruction.
"If she made a mistake, she
would instantly kowtow and apologise," she said.
Doecke worked with other Chinese
coaches who had left their home country and said they would jest that she would
need to be forceful to get the best out of Chen.
"As I worked with Chen, I
would hear from time to time, 'if you want a good performance out of her,
you'll have to beat her'," she said.
China's dominance in sports like
table tennis and badminton has seen Western athletes level similar accusations
of mistreatment.
Britain's top women table tennis
players said China's methods would not be allowed elsewhere.
"It wouldn't be legal in
Britain to train as hard as the Chinese," said Joanna Parker, Britain's
top female player, last week.
Her team mate Kelly Sibley told
the Olympic news service: "It's how they (Chinese coaches) treat them
(Chinese trainee players) as well.
"We were playing a couple of
years ago in a centre in Shanghai. Someone was playing and the coach just went
up and kicked him in the side."
Chinese officials have bristled
at the criticism.
"You have to train hard. Why
does the West think like this?" Shi Zhihao, the male head of China's
women's table tennis team, said angrily in response.
"China is very free, if you
want you can do it, and if you don't want to do it you don't have to."
Chen declined to comment on
whether she had been subject to physical discipline by her Chinese coaches, but
defended it as being misunderstood.
"The coaches are like
athletes' parents," she said in comments emailed to Reuters.
"Most of the time, coaches care
about their divers even more than their own children.
"Diving is a dangerous
sport, things could change in a second ... thus, as parents they have to do
anything that force their children to do things safely.
"Sometimes it ends up (that
they) hit their divers, but I know that it will more hurt inside of coaches
every time when they had to hit their divers."
Cash bonuses
The athletes that bring China
Olympic glory stand to receive grateful thanks from the state, with cash
bonuses from China's national sports ministry and from lower levels of
government for bringing prestige to their home towns and provinces.
Less successful athletes have
much less to fall back on and state media have reported a number of cases of
retired national champions struggling with long-term injuries and poverty.
Chinese athletes in London have,
nonetheless, been largely unreserved in their praise of their coaches and the
gruelling training systems that have taken the delegation to more than 35 gold
medals in London.
However, Chinese swimmer Lu Ying,
who won silver in the women's 100 metres butterfly in London, spoke out against
the team's domestic training system as being all work and no play.
"In China we're used to
study, study and train, train and then rest," Lu, who has done part of her
training in Australia since 2008, said through an interpreter earlier this
week.
"I think our way of thinking
has many limits. In Australia I've been invited to barbecues with my teammates
- that would never happen in China."
China's top badminton player Lin
Dan, who defended his men's singles gold at London, also broke ranks with his
team amid a match-throwing scandal last week that claimed two of his team mates
among eight players disqualified from the tournament.
The four women's doubles pairs,
including China's world champions Yu Yang and Wang Xiaoli, were expelled for
deliberately playing to lose in a bid to improve their position in the draw for
the knockout rounds.
Lin blamed the world governing
body for instituting a round-robin format for the Olympic tournament that was
ripe for manipulation, but said the disqualified players' tactics had brought a
"negative" impact on the sport.
All costs
Chinese bloggers linked that
scandal to the country's pursuit of Olympic medals at all costs and have
criticised the system for putting too much pressure on Olympians to succeed.
"The whole-nation system is
disastrous," wrote one user on China's Twitter-like microblogging service
Sina Weibo.
"The budding young talents
are shut up in closed training schools from a young age and apart from their
own events, almost have no other life skills."
Despite the criticism, China's
Communist Party leaders rely on the system to produce champions that can puff
up national pride, and are unlikely to tinker with it, according to Xu Guoqi, a
professor at the University of Hong Kong and an expert in Chinese sports.
"As long as the Chinese are
not confident enough of themselves in the world, as long as the regime has a
legitimacy problem, it will continue its 'juguo tizhi'," he said in
comments emailed to Reuters.
"Some people might criticise
the system, but imagine the pressure and attacks on athletes and the regime if
China fails to do well in the Games."
Reuters
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