MEDALS OBSCURE COST OF CHINA'S STATE-RUN SPORTS REGIME
LONDON, Aug 9 (Reuters) China's massive medal haul at the London Games has once again showcased the country's ability to produce champions through its rigid Soviet-style sports regime, but national pride has been tempered by concerns about the human costs of sporting glory.
Chinese bloggers expressed their disgust last week after a Shanghai newspaper reported that the parents of Olympic diver Wu Minxia had concealed her mother's long battle with breast cancer for fear of disturbing her training.
Wu, 26, who was also shielded from news of her grandparents' deaths, shrugged off the controversy to win both the sychronised and individual three-metre springboard events in London.
“It's not only Chinese athletes who are like this. Parents seldom come to our training base and we are just like a big family who all train together,” Wu said after winning the individual title on Sunday. “There may be distance from our families but the distance doesn't make us feel we are far apart. I chose to be a diver to pursue this goal.” While the fall of Communism in Europe in the 1980s and 1990s put paid to the command-and-control systems that turned the Soviet Union and East Germany into sporting superpowers, China's “juguo tizhi” - literally 'whole nation system' - remains as entrenched as ever.
Like Wu, the greater majority of China's 396 Olympians have started their sports at tender ages, sacrificed their childhoods for the state and drawn their emotional support from team mates, coaches and officials, in lieu of family members and friends.
The relationship remains strong between the athletes and the state that nurtured them, and fairytale stories abound of Chinese children wrenched from poverty and enriched by success on the global stage.
But the Olympic medals have obscured the more unsavoury aspects of the sports regime, which has been blamed for leaving less successful athletes uneducated and ill-equipped to thrive outside the competition venues.
ABUSE ACCUSATIONS
It has also drawn criticism from Western coaches who have accused their Chinese counterparts of producing winners through systematic physical abuse.
“You wonder why the Chinese women are so successful? Most of the men are coaches. The women are literally beaten into submission,” Johannah Doecke, diving coach at the Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis in the United States, told Reuters.
“If you said no to anything, you would be chastised, slapped around. It's a brutal system.” Doecke trained one of China's elite divers in Chen Ni, who rose to a provincial grade before migrating to the U.S. at the age of 19.
Doecke describes Chen as someone who was terrified of making a mistake when she first came under her instruction. “If she made a mistake, she would instantly kowtow and apologise,” she said.
Doecke worked with other Chinese coaches who had left their home country and said they would jest that she would need to be forceful to get the best out of Chen. “As I worked with Chen, I would hear from time to time, 'if you want a good performance out of her, you'll have to beat her',” she said.
China's dominance in sports like table tennis and badminton has seen Western athletes level similar accusations of mistreatment.
Britain's top women table tennis players said China's methods would not be allowed elsewhere.
“It wouldn't be legal in Britain to train as hard as the Chinese,” said Joanna Parker, Britain's top female player, last week.
Her team mate Kelly Sibley told the Olympic news service: “It's how they (Chinese coaches) treat them (Chinese trainee players) as well. “We were playing a couple of years ago in a centre in Shanghai. Someone was playing and the coach just went up and kicked him in the side.” Chinese officials have bristled at the criticism.