For China, all that matters is gold
Six days a week since she was 12 years old, with only a few days of time away each year, Hou Zhihui has been driven by one mission: heaving more than double her body weight into the air.
Yesterday, at the Tokyo Olympics, Hou’s dedication — sequestered from her family, dogged by near constant pain — paid off. She won gold in the 49kg division and shattered three Olympic records, part of a fearsome Chinese women’s weightlifting squad that aimed to sweep every weight class it was contesting.
“The Chinese weightlifting team is very cohesive, and the support from the entire team is very good,” Hou, 24, said after winning gold.
“The only thing we athletes think about is focusing on training.”
China’s sports assembly line is designed for one purpose: churning out gold medals for the glory of the nation. Silver and bronze barely count.
By fielding 413 athletes in Tokyo, its largest number since the Beijing Games in 2008, China aims to land at the top of the gold medal count — even if the Chinese public is increasingly wary of the sacrifices made by individual athletes.
“We must resolutely ensure we are first in gold medals,” Gou Zhongwen, the head of the Chinese Olympic Committee, said on the eve of the Tokyo Olympics.
Rooted in the Soviet model, the Chinese system relies on the state to scout tens of thousands of children for full-time training at more than 2000 government-run sports schools. To maximise its golden harvest, Beijing has focused on less prominent sports that are underfunded in the West or sports that offer multiple Olympic gold medals.
It is no coincidence that nearly 75 per cent of the Olympic golds China has won since 1984 are in just six sports: table tennis, shooting, diving, badminton, gymnastics and weightlifting. More than two-thirds of China’s golds have come courtesy of female champions, and nearly 70 per cent of its Tokyo delegation are women.
Women’s weightlifting, which became a medal sport at the 2000 Sydney Games, was an ideal target for Beijing’s gold medal strategy. The sport is a niche pursuit for most athletic powerhouses, meaning that female lifters in the West must scramble for funding. And with multiple weight classes, weightlifting offers up four potential golds.
For Beijing’s sports czars, it did not matter that weightlifting has no mass appeal in China or that the preteen girls funnelled into the system had no idea that such a sport even existed. At the weightlifting national team’s training centre in Beijing, a giant Chinese flag covers an entire wall, reminding lifters that their duty is to nation, not to self.
“The system is highly efficient,” said Li Hao, the head of the weightlifting squad at the 2016 Games in Rio de Janeiro and the current director of the anti-doping department at the Centre for Weightlifting, Wrestling and Judo at the General Administration of Sport of China. “It’s probably why our weightlifting is more advanced than other countries and regions.”
Beijing’s focus has been on sports that can be perfected with rote routines, rather than those that involve an unpredictable interplay of multiple athletes. Aside from women’s volleyball, China has never won Olympic gold in a large team sport.
In Tokyo, Beijing’s strategy had delivered 20 golds by last night, edging out Japan and the United States for the lead. China captured the first gold of the Games, in the women’s 10m air rifle, and scored its first fencing victory. (The sports in which China is dominant are clustered in the first week of the Games.)
But in some of China’s traditional strongholds, like table tennis, diving and weightlifting, hopes of golden sweeps did not materialise. There were other disappointments before the Games began. A top swimmer was banned because of doping. The men’s soccer, volleyball and basketball teams failed to qualify.
For the Chinese sports machine, all those punishing years of effort can still be foiled in the heat of Olympic competition. On Monday in Tokyo, Liao, the lifter in the 55kg division, began the event as the reigning world champion. Two days before, in a lighter weight class, Hou had taken the gold.
Liao marched on to the stage with an expression that hovered between resolve and resignation. In the last moments of competition, a Philippine rival surpassed her to claim gold.
Afterward, Liao, 26, stood crying, her breath jagged. Her coach wrapped her arm around Liao and sobbed, too. Eventually, Liao, red-eyed, took questions from Chinese reporters. A silver was a great achievement, one journalist said. Liao looked at the floor.
“Today, I did my best,” she said. The tears flowed again.
The trauma of all those years fighting the unforgiving force of mass and gravity weighed on Liao’s body.
“They’ve been there for years,” she said of her injuries. “Over and over again.”
But unlike Simone Biles or Naomi Osaka, Olympians who have spoken of the emotional strain of so much pressure, Liao did not address the mental toll of what she has done, day after day, since she was a little girl.
Liao sighed. She wiped her eyes with the sleeve of her uniform. The National Games were coming up, she said, and she would be representing her home province of Hunan. The Olympics were over for her. She had a new job to do.