At What Price Glory?

By Gemma

As anyone with access to the internet, television, or a newspaper knows, these summer Olympic Games have put the city of Beijing under an international microscope. From the city’s pollution, to China’s record of human rights abuse, to the somewhat bizarre public facelift the city has undergone in preparation for the Games, nothing remains unscrutinized in the world media. Coverage of the Chinese athletes themselves is no exception, or more specifically, their performance, and the intense pressure from family and country to succeed. From the highest levels of government to the poorest provincials, the Chinese are in it to win it, for pride, for history, and for the Glory of the nation.

A brief Olympic history, as regards the Chinese: during the Mao Zedong years, China sat out every international sporting event, refusing to share a stage with ideologically opposite Western nations, not to mention the Taiwanese. After China opened its doors in the late 1970s, sports were not a high priority, with a bankrupt communist economy to fix. The first Olympic medal ever for the Chinese came in 1984, and they haven’t looked back, sharply increasing their medal count at each Olympiad.

Not only was it victory on an international scale, it was a signal to the world that China was shedding its isolationist past and ready to progress with other major nations. In Athens in 2004, the Chinese were second only to the Americans in the gold medal count, and third in overall medals behind the US and Russia.

How has a nation undergone such a massive change in such a short time? Simple: they decided they were going to.

Determined to prove themselves as a force to be reckoned with, the Chinese have adopted an athletic development program like that of Soviet Russia; a vast athletic machine, highly regimented and reminiscent of China’s Communist past. The road to national glory starts early. Children as young as 5 or 6 are recruited into boarding schools, sent to live and train, eat and breathe a sport for which they demonstrate potential. Tian Hua, headmaster of one such gymnastics boarding school, describes the Chinese sports system as “like a pyramid. We’re the base, the fattest part of the pyramid. The middle of the pyramid is the professional provincial teams, and the national team is the apex.” It is a systematic approach designed to identify and foster as many champions as possible, to give China the best shot at success.

Why would a parent, especially one in a country with such a brutal one child policy, send their son or daughter away from home at such a young age? For one thing, everything is funded by the Chinese government. For very poor families, having a child singled out for such training is both an enormous honor and a financial burden lifted. Sports anthropologist Susan Brownell, who has been working at Beijing Sports University, agrees that, in some ways, Chinese athletes have a much better deal than American, in that their training is all government subsidized, while American athletes foot their own bills.

But even though the obstacle of funding such training is removed, that still doesn’t explain why many Chinese youth give so much of their lives to sports. It’s hard for those of us not raised in such a culture to understand. Certainly American champions are celebrated, seen on talk shows and maybe even a Wheaties box, if they’re lucky. Those that bring glory to the nation of China are revered. Money, fame, the works. They are rewarded for bringing honor to the Chinese nation, to their home Province, to their hometown, and to their family.

So, successful athletes are revered, and showered with financial gifts and adulation. But what happens to these champions once they have fulfilled their promise? And what of those who didn’t quite make it? No longer able to compete, they are discarded into a world for which they are unprepared. Having spent all their time training, most received no real education, Zhao Younghua was a skier on the Chinese team, a national champion, who was diagnosed with severe diabetes and told she had to continue her training in spite of it. Soon after, her illness forced her to retire, and she found herself physical debilitated and incapable of supporting herself. Her story isn’t rare.

Chinese athletes are encouraged to train and compete through injuries, often resulting in conditions that will follow them the rest of their lives. Once they are no longer winning medals for China, no longer part of the victory machine, their financial woes are no longer the concern of the Chinese government, and they are often left poverty-stricken.

The medal predictions (yes, there are people who actually spend their time calculating that) are in, and China seems poised to walk away with the winning numbers they so crave. Given the planning, the home court advantage (and frankly, the population of 1.3 billion), that isn’t a shocking revelation. The system will have worked, the strongest and fastest will have emerged victorious as an extension of the Chinese nation. Once they regain their individuality, will it have been worth the human cost?