> Shame! Shame! Shame on China! China's Medal Quest of Misery and Shame! --
> China Presses Injured
> Athletes in Quest for Gold
>
>
> The New York Times
>
> June 20, 2008
>
> China Presses Injured Athletes in Quest for Gold
>
> By HOWARD W. FRENCH
>
> SHANGHAI ― When China’s champion 10-meter platform diver suffered a
> detached retina while training,
> a year after winning a gold medal in the 2004 Athens Olympics, family
> members and fans speculated
> about the imminent end of a great career.
>
> The parents of the diver, Hu Jia, had surrendered him to trainers from the
> Chinese sports
> establishment at the age of 10, and had seen little of him since then. In
> an interview with a
> Chinese newspaper after the diver’s injury, his father suggested that
> this was sacrifice enough. Had
> he known his son risked blindness, the father said, “I would never have
> sent him off to dive.”
>
> But less than two months before China hosts the Olympics for the first
> time, Mr. Hu is training and
> competing fiercely again, aiming to bolster a national diving squad that
> China hopes will dominate
> the sport this summer.
>
> “The Beijing Olympics is an enormous glory to our generation,” Mr. Hu,
> whose other retina was also
> injured, was quoted in the Chinese media as saying last year. Speaking of
> another gold medal, he
> added, “I will do my utmost to grab one, unless my eyes are really
> blind.”
>
> Pressured by the national athletic system and tempted by the commercial
> riches awaiting star
> performers in the 2008 Games, China’s athletes are pushing themselves to
> their limits and beyond,
> causing some to risk their health in pursuit of nationalist glory.
>
> “An astonishing amount of manpower, money and goods have been poured in,
> so much so that it’s
> inappropriate to be revealed publicly,” said Lu Yuanzhen, a professor of
> sports sociology at the
> Academy of Sports Sciences at South China Normal University. If the
> country’s athletes do not
> perform up to expectations, he added, “the entire nation and its people
> will lose face.”
>
> Since surpassing Russia to win the second most gold medals in the 2004
> Olympics, its highest ranking
> ever, China has held an unofficial but undeniable ambition to cap the
> hosting of the Games by
> surpassing the United States and finishing atop the medal board.
>
> The resulting pressure is felt by nearly all of China’s Olympic
> aspirants, from still largely
> unheralded performers in relatively unglamorous sports to the country’s
> brightest marquee names,
> like Yao Ming, the Houston Rockets center who sat out the final two months
> of the N.B.A. season with
> a stress fracture in his left foot but is still expected to play for China’s national team.
>
> Athletes regarded as potential gold medalists have been urged out of
> retirement, and some female
> stars have been urged to resume training and competing soon after giving
> birth. Previous gold medal
> winners, meanwhile, have heard for four years that failure to pull off a
> repeat victory will let the
> whole nation down. Many have trained for the Games despite serious
> injuries. A female weight lifter,
> Tang Gonghong, persevered until early this year despite having such high
> blood pressure that her
> chief coach said it “threatens her life at any moment.”
>
> ‘Don’t Retreat’
>
> These pressures can perhaps be seen most clearly in the recent experience
> of Liu Xiang, a Chinese
> track athlete who became a national hero and the country’s most popular
> sports star in Athens when
> he won the 110-meter men’s hurdles, a sport in which China had never
> excelled. Mr. Liu’s coach was
> recently quoted in China Daily, the official English-language newspaper,
> as saying, “Officials from
> the State General Administration of Sport once told us that if Liu cannot
> win another gold medal in
> Beijing, all of his previous achievements will become meaningless.”
>
> So far, Mr. Liu has not had to contend with a serious injury. But last
> August, after winning the
> track world championships in Japan, he spoke of the agony of high
> expectations. “I’ve been tortured
> these days,” Mr. Liu said. “I was afraid of speaking too much. I’ve
> never been so nervous; more
> nervous than in the Olympics, because there’s too much attention on me.”
>
> For many athletes, playing through injuries is standard practice. Most of
> China’s Olympic-caliber
> competitors are tightly controlled by a system that manages almost every
> aspect of their lives,
> often from early childhood. This includes housing, education, medical care
> and interactions with the
> public and the news media. In this system, decisions about training
> regimens and the risks of
> injuries do not get much of a public airing. The case of Zheng Jie, a top
> female doubles tennis
> player, however, provides a glimpse of how the obligation to perform often
> operates.
>
> Despite a painful ankle injury, Ms. Zheng played a punishing schedule last
> year to gain tour points
> required to compete in the Olympics. In a news conference after she lost
> in the first round of the
> French Open, she broke down in tears. “The pain in my foot was so strong
> I could hardly
> concentrate,” she said.
>
> Ms. Zheng said her doctor had told her that she risked permanent injury if
> she kept playing without
> treatment and rest. But in an interview, she said her coach denied her
> request to concede the French
> Open match. In a television interview after her defeat, the coach, Jiang
> Hongwei, said Ms. Zheng and
> her teammate, Yan Zi, “had too much concern for their injuries, which was
> an important factor in
> their performance.”
>
> “The philosophy of our sports system has several bad points,” said Chen
> Peide, former director of
> the Zhejiang Province Sports Bureau. “Urging people to tenaciously strive
> to succeed, to be faster,
> to jump higher, to be stronger and to win more gold medals usually comes
> at the expense of athletes’
> health.
>
> “When they’re having a 100- or 102-degree fever, we tell them not to
> give up so easily,” he said.
>
> Mr. Chen said that a Communist war slogan, “Don’t retreat from the front
> lines with light injuries,”
> was a pet phrase of Chinese athletes and coaches.
>
> While Ms. Zheng invoked her doctor’s advice in appealing to her coach,
> for many other Olympics
> hopefuls, medical decisions are made without consulting medical
> professionals.
>
> “The athletes themselves basically have no idea of their injuries and
> they usually don’t have a say”
> in how they are treated, said Dr. Wang Yubin, the medical director for the
> sports injury department
> at Shanghai East International Medical Center. Decisions about how to
> handle injuries of important
> athletes, he said, are made by officials of the sporting establishment.
>
> Sacrificing for a Payoff
>
> If it is true that the system pushes athletes hard, many athletes are just
> as demanding of
> themselves. Since the 1980s, when the commercialization of sports began in
> China, money has become a
> powerful incentive alongside the drive for glory. “I once treated a
> national weight-lifting champion
> and warned him not to carry on in the sport anymore,” Dr. Wang said. “I
> told both him and his
> parents that in the worst case, he could be paralyzed for life. The
> parents replied that there was
> nothing for their child to do but persevere.
>
> “They said, ‘What else can he do if he doesn’t lift weights?’ ”
>
> Li Zhuo, a retired silver medalist in the women’s weight-lifting
> 48-kilogram category in 2004, put
> it another way. “Once you win gold, your status is changed and you become
> another person,” she said,
> referring to the monetary awards and business opportunities showered on
> victors. “One Olympics can
> change an athlete’s life, and that’s pressure.”
>
> Hu Jia, the gold medal diver, for example, was born to laid-off workers in
> Hubei Province in central
> China. When he was 6 years old, his parents piled quilts on the ground,
> then let him jump from a bed
> to practice diving. Three years later, he was spotted by a former diver
> and sent to train with a
> coach in Guangdong, where he made the provincial team. He was considered
> relatively untalented by
> coaches and mocked by the public as a perpetual also-ran before the 2004
> Games. But he distinguished
> himself through unrelenting hard work, eventually beating out the
> favorite, Tian Liang, for a gold.
>
> Although a spot on this year’s squad is no sure thing, he has shown the
> same determination in
> working his way back from injury, forgoing anesthesia during eye surgery
> because he hoped it would
> speed recovery. “There are so many difficulties, surgery and injuries on
> the road, but I have to
> keep up to the last,” he told a newspaper in Wuhan.
>
> According to a study published in 2000, 24 percent of Chinese divers have
> had retina injuries. Yu
> Fen, a former national coach, said the high rate was because of poor
> screening of young athletes for
> congenital eye problems and antiquated, high-intensity training methods.
> Divers wear no goggles, and
> repeated impact with the water can damage eyes, Chinese medical experts
> say, especially if divers
> fail to close their eyes just before hitting the water.
>
> Dr. Wang Yongli, a sports medicine expert at Beijing Sports Hospital who
> discovered a high incidence
> of retina damage when he conducted a survey at the end of 1990s, said
> there had been minor changes
> in training techniques since then. But he said he did not expect them to
> have much effect on the
> rate of injury.
>
> “I don’t have any solid numbers to show what it’s like in other
> countries, but the rate should be
> lower compared to what I’ve found in the Chinese team,” Dr. Wang said.
>
> “The training regimen of foreign athletes by no means compares to ours,
> meaning the hours devoted to
> training, and the number of dives into the water. Chinese divers are
> professionals, which means they
> practice all day long, while Australians and Canadians might be a bank
> clerk or a dentist, who only
> spend two hours practicing after work.”
>
> As suggested by the injunction to athletes against retreating from the
> front lines, China’s national
> sports system does indeed borrow heavily from wartime, albeit largely from
> the cold war. Within five
> years of taking power in 1949, Mao Zedong adopted many of the features of
> the heavily centralized
> sports system of China’s then-Communist ally, the Soviet Union.
>
> As in the Soviet Union, China’s new sports establishment was deliberately
> conceived as an instrument
> of nation-building, a tool of mass mobilization and even of foreign
> policy, aimed both at increasing
> the country’s prestige and promoting feelings of integration among the
> people.
>
> Experts say, however, that the two systems quickly diverged as ties
> between Moscow and Beijing soured.
>
> “The Soviet system was centered on industry, with factory sponsors for
> each team, while the Chinese
> system was centered on government and military units,” said Susan
> Brownell, professor of
> anthropology at the University of Missouri-St. Louis and author of
> “Beijing’s Games: What the
> Olympics Mean to China.” “This created an aspect in the Chinese system
> of intense rivalries between
> the provinces, as well as between provinces and the central government.”
>
> Selection of athletes at the provincial level may begin when they are as
> young as 6, experts say,
> with as many as 2 percent of grade school students flagged as promising.
> These children are placed
> in all-expenses-paid sports schools and “filtered” through increasingly
> intensive competitions that
> weed out all but an elite 80,000 who find homes on provincial teams. Of
> those, only a tiny fraction
> will make the next big step, earning a place on China’s national team.
>
> The Strategy of Success
>
> “Pressure doesn’t just come from the central government, but from each
> province, and even from the
> cities the athletes come from,” said Mr. Chen, the former Zhejiang
> Province Sports Bureau director.
> “Quotas are assigned to each province, and if a province won several gold
> medals last time, it
> should perform at least as well this time. The promotion of sports
> officials in each province
> depends on how many medals their province has won.”
>
> In many sports, parents can go years without seeing their children, and
> may speak to them only once
> or twice a year. But local and provincial officials are unstintingly
> attentive, showering gifts on
> the families during Spring Festival, China’s most important holiday, to
> make up for the children’s
> absence.
>
> Major changes to China’s sports policy were instituted at the start of
> the era of economic reform in
> the early 1980s. Deng Xiaoping, then China’s top leader, announced the
> “Ten Year Sports Guidelines”
> and China returned to Olympic competition after a 32-year absence.
>
> This led to greatly increased spending on sports and new training methods,
> pioneered in the 1980s by
> Ma Junren, a legendary coach from Liaoning Province who insisted on
> multiple, grueling training
> sessions per day for track athletes rather than the two sessions that were
> customary in the West.
> Mr. Ma and many of his runners, known as “Ma’s army,” fell into
> disrepute and were withdrawn from
> Olympics competition in the late 1990s when many tested positive for
> steroids.
>
> A pillar of China’s recent strong rise in the Olympics-medal tallies has
> been the astute targeting
> of sports where medal opportunities seem greatest. In some categories,
> competition is relatively thin.
>
> “The Chinese have been very strategic in where they have put their
> energies,” said Ms. Brownell, a
> visiting professor at Beijing Sport University. “They have put major
> efforts into training for new
> events, so that they can set records as soon as the events come into
> effect. This has been the case
> with the triple jump, the pole vault and with women’s weight lifting.”
>
> Speaking of women’s weight lifting, Dai Guangyu, former vice chairman of
> the China Weight Lifting
> Association, said China’s national system had allowed it to invest in
> developing female weight
> lifters beginning in the 1980s. “Other countries didn’t have that many
> people involved,” Mr. Dai said.
>
> Since the 2000 Olympics, when women’s weight lifting was introduced,
> China has won half of the 14
> gold medals awarded, and on the eve of the Beijing Games, pressure is as
> high in this sport as in
> any to at least hold the line on gold medals. Mr. Dai acknowledged that a
> successful push in this
> sport ― widely seen as dangerous and unglamorous, making it hard for
> muscle-bound women to find work
> or spouses when their careers end ― depends on recruiting among the rural
> poor. With its heavy
> training, it also depends on being able to closely control an athlete’s
> life.
>
> Wang Mingjuan, one of three aspirants to represent China in the
> 48-kilogram category, was asked to
> try out recently in a higher weight category to give China an even better
> shot at winning medals.
> But she injured her lower back and has returned to her normal weight
> class. Her parents, who say
> they see her once every three or four years, said she had told them in
> their last phone call not to
> worry.
>
> “We don’t have much money, and the life was hard,” her mother, Wang
> Meiyu, said, explaining the
> decision to send her to a sports school at the age of 9. “She was so
> little and we couldn’t see her
> often, but when we visited, my heart felt bitter and sour. It was so
> tough.”
>
> Unless Ms. Wang and her teammates win gold, Chen Xiaomin, a women’s
> weight-lifting champion in the
> 2000 Olympics, said the bitterness was likely to continue. “It takes at
> least 10 years’ practice
> before you can become a world champion,” Ms. Chen said. “Once you win a
> world championship, you can
> go to college for free, or work, or become an official. If you don’t, you
> get nothing but injuries
> all over your body. No diploma, no job, no skill.”
>
> Li Zhen, Fan Wenxin and Shi Jing contributed reporting.
>
>