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.

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