Forging a champion

[nairiporter.livejournal.com]

This is Ye Shiwen, one of the many Chinese wonder-kids. As of Thursday, she has already won 2 gold medals in swimming on the Olympics. She is 16 years old, and indeed a true prodigy.

Her performance has been stunning. She keeps putting one world record after another, and makes it look too easy. In one of the races she even beat the scores of some of the men in the respective disciplines, including Michael Phelps.

Naturally, rumours started creeping in about the Chinese manipulating the doping tests, but Ye and her team adamantly deny all accusations.

What is the truth, actually? Well, if we look closer, we would begin to realise that Ye Shiwen and the other Chinese athletes in London are the end result of a long and very tough work in Chinese sports, involving the athletes themselves, hordes of trainers and the whole team that contributed to their development and preparation. It all began long before the years prior to the Beijing Olympics, and the Chinese are continuing to pick the fruits of that work today.

But if we look even further back, we would see that it started even earlier. In the 80s actually, when the communist regime in China decided to stop the long years of humiliation of their sports teams at any cost, and to breed a new generation of champions from scratch. And if we are looking for someone who has brought long-term thinking to perfection, it must be the Chinese.

For this purpose the orders came from the highest places, instructing all teachers (including those in the elementary schools) to pressure their pupils to the brink, and make them take an active participation in all sorts of sports events, so they could demonstrate their physical talents and capabilities from a very early age.

This probably reminds some of us of the "Tiger Moms" debate which was a broadly discussed question among the US public about a year and a half ago. Ye's mother once said in an interview that her daughter had shown an inclination for swimming from the age of 7. In fact she was picked because she had an unusually "male" stature, with extraordinarily large arms and long legs - all indications of a potentially great swimming athlete.

The little Ye was immediately separated from her family and sent to a sports camp in Chen Jingluin. The experts decided she was most suited for swimming, and they took responsibility for her preparation. At 11 she was already able to win the youth championship of her country.

In swimming, like in most Olympic sports, the training regime in countries like China is so cruel and harsh that some Western experts go as far as to compare it to the prison system in the 19th century. Children of an age that would pass for too young in most Western countries, are already subject to heavy professional training, separated from their families and fostered in special sports camps. They are made to train so hard that they would often spend sleepless nights crying from exhaustion, and beatings by the trainers are not a rarity either.

Recently some pictures of kids living in those conditions in such sports schools surfaced in the media, and it was clearly visible that they were literally being tortured in order to squeeze the best result out of them.

The pictures are profoundly disturbing.

And this is not all. Brainwashing the young future champions is also an essential part of the Chinese state-run sports project. The little athletes are taught to believe that the very mission of their life is to "beat the Americans", as well as everybody else who would dare to contest their claim to the highest step on the Olympic pedestal.

The youngsters are taught from an early age to give quick and short answers to media questions, although the young generation of Olympic athletes are seemingly more talkative than before, probably because of the more frequent contacts with the Western media. And the Internet, of course.

One of Ye's team-mates even had the audacity to confess that she preferred the far more liberal and laid-back training regime in Australia, where she had had the chance to do some of her training before the Olympics, which was much better than the harsh guidance of her demanding trainers back in China.

Recently some other Chinese athletes also commented how they had been so pre-programmed in the sports camps, that they were hardly able to look after themselves and sort out their life, once their short professional sports career was over. They have difficulties finding a job and integrating in society, as they have irretrievably lost an essential part of their social development in the years spent imprisoned within the Chinese sports system.

Meanwhile, what the public mostly sees on the surface is the tons of gold they keep winning, and what they will remember forever is the pomposity of the Beijing opening ceremony, 4 years ago. And praise how unforgettable it was, and how no other Olympics would ever be able to "beat it". How all those amateur actors had been prepared for the spectacle, is yet another question that, sadly, remained largely ignored.

Comments

[fizzyland.livejournal.com]

And the Olympics itself creates massive debt in every host city/country, while lining the pockets of corrupt fatcats.

[sophia-sadek.livejournal.com]

The British are experts at managing massive debt.

[mahnmut.livejournal.com]

By printing MOAR money.

[fizzyland.livejournal.com]

I don't think colonialism is their solution this time around, however.

[airiefairie.livejournal.com]

Quiet, helpless rage... is what I feel while looking at those pictures.

Monsters...

[sophia-sadek.livejournal.com]

Call out the Air Force! Call out the Marines! We must rescue those Chinese children from this despicable practice. They would be better here in the US where the worse thing we do to our children is force them to take mind altering drugs when they are overly precocious.

[404.livejournal.com]

Aren't you cute.

[nairiporter.livejournal.com]

I just finished watching Gabby Douglas, an 16 year old girl from Virginia, grab the Olympic gold (http://www.usatoday.com/sports/olympics/london/gymnastics/story/2012-08-02/gabby-douglas-aly-raisman-olympic-gymnastics-all-around/56704226/1) in women's all-around in gymnastics.

Her coach is Liang Chow, a Chinese coach.

I doubt she was having her legs stepped on, or if she was ever stranded on the wall for hours, or her back twisted in impossible positions until tears would start rolling down from her eyes from the excruciating pain. And I doubt she was ever taken away from her family, to live in some camp.

I would bet she is just an ordinary girl with a slightly busier schedule...

And yet, she won the Olympic gold in the toughest discipline in her field. Without mind-altering drugs or anything.

[htpcl.livejournal.com]

Just for clarity, you were trying to be funny there, right?

[telemann.livejournal.com]

[ddstory.livejournal.com]

Has everything been all right with you as of late?

[auntiesiannan.livejournal.com]

Stop promoting Scientology in this community, please.

[fornikate.livejournal.com]

oh

[peristaltor.livejournal.com]

Yeah, why are all the good drugs being wasted on children?!?

[fizzyland.livejournal.com]

You mean the children tearing around tables in a restaurant while making sounds that would frighten off hyenas?

[paedraggaidin.livejournal.com]

I find it hard to believe that anyone is surprised that Communist countries treat their children like this. Except the pro-Commie apologists, who are no better than credulous idiots, really. This is a country that is brutal and corrupt from the very top of the Politburo down to the local Party bosses and factory managers, whose quasi-fascist outlook is that the Middle Kingdom is racially, socially, politically, economically, and militarily superior to every other nation, yet considers its citizens little more than mindless expendable automatons, numbers on a page to be added and subtracted as needed. Children's rights, in a country where forced abortion is mandated and the most basic of civil liberties are laughed at as Western follies? Children are machines to be used to the greater glory of the State and nothing more.

Everyone else may have forgotten Tiananmen Square, or relegated it to the past brutality of a changing and modernizing society. In reality, nothing fundamental has changed; the guns and jackboots are just a little shinier these days.

[peristaltor.livejournal.com]

Wait, are you accusing them of being Communist or "quasi-fascist?"

'Cause they're, like, exactly opposite.

[fizzyland.livejournal.com]

I guess these are people who also don't know the various horrible ways that China's One Child policy is enforced.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Reminds me of how the old USSR reacted with its Olympic teams. And it's an unfortunate demonstration of how little in some ways the PRC's changed at all.

[htpcl.livejournal.com]

And if they dare cheat (http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/2012/aug/02/chinese-player-quits-badminton-olympic), they're done.

[policraticus.livejournal.com]

The Beijing Olympics were the most shameful since the 1936 Berlin Games.

[htpcl.livejournal.com]

The peak of my country's performance at the Olympics was in Moscow'88. 10 gold, 12 silver, 13 bronze. 7th place in total.

What brought that success to a tiny country? Two things. Extensive investment in sports, particularly at the amateur levels; and some serious planning and dedicated work from the coaches. Again, from earliest level. I don't care if you'd call that communism or not, it exists in all big teams, including in the so-called West.

Now we've got nothing. Our sports are deteriorating with every next big sports forum. Our athletes are compelled to either put up with the meager conditions they've been relegated to at home, or sell their talent abroad. Which many of them have done. Two Bulgarians have already won medals for Azerbaijan on these Games, there's a Bulgarian wrestler in the US team, and numerous weightlifters and wrestlers in the Turkish team, and all around the Middle East, where they're paid in gold for their talent. But the only ones to blame for letting them go, are us, and no one else. Because everyone wants to develop, and they were denied the conditions to do so.

The training was always tough for our golden girls in the brilliant gymnastics generation of the 80s/90s. Even today, in interviews they recall how tough it had been. "No pain, no gain", they conclude in the end. "We don't regret a thing from our past, save maybe the missed opportunities to spend our childhood playing games with our peers and having fun while it mattered". A lost childhood, for the sake of glory.

These things are inevitable in sport to some extent, if any success is to be achieved. I like playing tennis. I was at the tennis court the other day, and on the neighboring court a small boy was playing, not more than 5. He was hitting the ball so hard I spent most of that hour gazing at him in amazement. His dad was his coach, and he kept encouraging him and/or criticizing him after every hit, and demanding for the little boy to give his best. He was probably forging a future champion. Or maybe just a future boy who'd only love to occasionally play some tennis for fun, I don't know. No sweat, no wins on the field, granted.

But the Chinese have brought that effort to a such an extreme that it has become something grotesque, and despicable. Evil.

If there was Hell, I hope they burn there for it.

[policraticus.livejournal.com]

1988 was Seoul. Moscow was 1980, when the US boycotted the games due to the invasion of Afghanistan by the USSR. Bulgaria came in 3rd in the medal count that year with 8 gold, 16 silver and 17 bronze.

[yes-justice.livejournal.com]

Naturally, rumours started creeping in about the Chinese manipulating the doping tests

Presumptively = Naturally. I hope she passes all her screening and everyone apologizes to her.

David Zirin writes eloquently about sports civil rights issues.

http://www.edgeofsports.com/

[jerseycajun.livejournal.com]

The only original thought I had regarding this (because others have already expressed thoughts sympathetic to mine) is overall what is good about sports and competition, and how ugly it is when the good aspects stop being part of the equation, and one is only left with the hollow, and transitory aspects to pursue as reasons. This goes for parents who push sports expectations on their kids as well as for nationalistic dehumanizing for gold medals.

But yeah, this is particularly horrific.