Topic: News: Chinese have eyes on the prize, but backlash may be beginning

[Chris Ⓐ LeRoux]

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Chinese have eyes on the prize, but backlash may be beginning
By Geoffrey York

BEIJING -- Zhang Yu is only 8, but he is already a veteran fighter in China's long campaign for Olympic glory.

The tiny gymnast, with his muscled chest, performs his flips and handstands beneath a giant Chinese flag and a patriotic banner that proclaims "Training hard for the honour of the country."

The son of a newspaper-delivery man, he was spotted when he was 5 as he played in his kindergarten. Running and jumping might be fun for kids, but it's serious business for Chinese coaches, who are already searching for the next Olympic athletes. They noticed his slim physique, his long limbs and his smooth movements as he ran and leaped around in his schoolyard.

They sent him to Dongcheng Sports School in Beijing, one of the 3,000 sports schools at the core of China's amazing medal-producing sports machinery. And they began the task of moulding him into an Olympic winner.

Today, they still watch his diet, making sure he consumes plenty of fruit and collagen protein. They keep him practising his gymnastics every day. They tell his parents to limit his time on computer games or television. Even now, in the summer holidays, he is training for seven hours a day.

"Look at him," his coach, Liu Kuilin, said as the boy did another perfect handstand on wooden bars. "His every gesture is better than the other kids here."

And now, after three years of training, Zhang Yu has been chosen for Beijing's elite sports school, Shichahai, where he will live in a dormitory and train for three hours a day throughout the year.

He won't be ready for the Olympics in Beijing next year, but his rapid success is an example of the relentless drive of the Chinese system. It helps explain why China is widely expected to overtake the United States at the top of the medal table next year.

The 600 students at the Shichahai sports school are the pinnacle of the youth system. Among its graduates are 32 world champions and Olympic gold medalists.

"I'm very excited to go there," Zhang Yu said, standing erect with perfect military-style posture as he answered questions in a solemn voice.

He says he saw gymnastics on television when he was four years old and always dreamed of competing in the sport. His hero is Teng Haibin, a graduate of Shichahai who won a gold medal in gymnastics at Athens in 2004.

Many observers have accused the Chinese sports system of being too harsh and even sometimes abusive to the child athletes. But young Zhang Yu has no complaints. "The coaches are sometimes strict and they criticize me when I do something wrong, and I get scared," he said. "But they're also nice to me."

A visit to their training room shows the child gymnasts as happy and cheerful. The coaches are relaxed, but alert. One coach shouts "don't talk" when one of children says something to another child during a routine.

The Chinese system is sometimes called "state amateurism" - a system born in the Soviet Union and still alive today only in China, Cuba and North Korea.

The entire system is focused on Olympic medals and world championships. Children with championship potential are spotted when they are four or five years old. Within a few years, they leave their parents and live in dormitories, with everything geared to the ultimate goal of the Olympics. About 300,000 children and young adults are training in the sports-school system in China today.

The Chinese government is spending an estimated $100-million annually on its training system for elite athletes. Considering the low wages and cheap costs in China, this budget puts the country far ahead of the others in the effective value of its sports budget. It allows them to hire the best coaches, trainers, sports scientists and sports psychologists.

Moreover, the Chinese system is centrally organized. China brings all of its top athletes to the National Training Centre in Beijing, where they live and train together for the entirety. (Canadian athletes, in contrast, usually train in the communities where they live.)

Canadian gymnasts have watched their Chinese rivals at close quarters this summer at a joint training camp in Beijing. "It's the best system in the world, and their team is the best in the world, no question," said Jeff Thomson, the program director of the Canadian men's artistic gymnastics team.

"They're so far ahead of the rest of the world because of their training system. It's a true system. They're able to have very centralized training. They all train in one place, and that improves the performance of everyone. It's an optimal situation: the best gymnasts with the best coaches and best facilities, along with the medical team and the sports science. It's all in one place."

Canadian gymnasts usually begin in the sport when they are six to 10 years old, Thomson said. The Chinese usually start when they're five or six years old. "That's one of the reasons they are so good - they start early," Thomson said.

China makes no secret of the fact that its entire sports system is aimed at producing national glory and pride. Basketball superstar Yao Ming discovered this when he reported late to the Chinese national team after being delayed by arrangements for his wedding this summer. He was sharply chastised for thinking that his personal life is more important than the needs of his country.

"No matter how sweet personal life is, it can't be compared to the exultation of capturing glory for one's nation," the Chinese sports federation said in its daily newspaper.

This emphasis on national glory is beginning to provoke a backlash. Some Chinese media have complained the government is investing hugely in an "assembly line" to turn athletes into a "gold-seizing machine."

In this production line, the losers are often simply discarded. Many Chinese were dismayed by the story of Zou Chunlan, a former national weightlifting champion who was left with only a third-grade education because of the heavy emphasis on training. Last year, at the age of 36, she was discovered at a public bathhouse, scrubbing people's backs for the equivalent of a dime a person. She said she was qualified only to do manual labour.

In one scandal last year, a sports school in northeastern China was caught with bottles of steroids, testosterone and other banned substances. The drugs were being injected into 10 teenage athletes.

"At the root of all this are the Chinese bureaucrats and their crazy worship of Olympic gold," one person commented on a Chinese website after the doping scandal.

"For a long time now, Chinese sports have never been the people's sports. They are the sports of politics and bureaucrats."

COUNTDOWN TO BEIJING

Tomorrow is a year to the day from the opening of the Beijing Summer Olympics. In part two of our three-part series on the countdown to the Games, Geoffrey York looks at up-and-comers in the Chinese gymnastic system. Tomorrow, in part three, Beverley Smith and James Christie will look at China's history at the Olympics, its remarkable surge and what we can expect to see a year from now.