China’s route to gold: Authoritarian ‘medal factories’
MUMBAI: The Chinese media has been seething. The national team has had, what news agency Xinhua branded, the “worst Olympic flop” at Rio de Janeiro.
The anger at the 70 medals, 26 of them gold, is understandable. After all, didn’t the Chinese win 51 gold at the Beijing Olympics and 38 gold last time in London --- a far cry from the five gold it won at the 1988 Seoul Games.
The turnaround from Seoul to Beijing, though, begs the question — just how are the Chinese so good?
The answer lies in the authoritarian system which lays great emphasis on inducting kids as young as five years into state-run academies or schools, which focus solely on athletic perfection and medals at international tournaments.
Most of these schools, often branded as ‘medal factories’, required children to live in the school full-time, a regulation which has now been relaxed. The system dictates what a player does. It controls every aspect of the player’s life and claims up to 65% of earnings from endorsements or competition wins.
It was this iron-fisted control that forced tennis ace Li Na to quit the Chinese sports system in 2008. The decision meant she could finally choose her coach and tournaments which she could compete in. She also has to pay just 12% of her earnings to the country. Such liberty for athletes was rare until some time ago.
After all, for decades it was this system which led the Chinese to dominate sports like badminton, gymnastics, table tennis and diving at the Olympics.
The competition for places in the national team for such sports can be so strong that many athletes have had to leave China. According to a New York Times (NYT) report, as many as 44 table tennis players at the Rio Olympics were born in China, but only six of them represented the Asian giant.
For a sport like table tennis, city teams’ best players are picked by provincial clubs, which in turn export their best to the national programme. Just the best 50 men and women make it to the top. The others are forced to leave to try their luck elsewhere. That is, if they are allowed to leave at all.
The authoritarian system sometimes forces them to continue playing against their wishes. A prominent example is Yang Wenjun, who won backto-back gold in flat-water canoeing in Athens and Beijing, being forced to compete despite having a liver disease, according to the NYT.