When it comes to sport China is somewhat schizophrenic. With no less than 100 medals at last year’s Olympics, including 51 golds, they broke the US-Russian monopoly of the games for the first time since 1936 to take their place atop the medals table. Yet their football team was dumped out of the World Cup before most people had even realized qualifying had begun, and when it comes to golf, rugby, men’s tennis and a host of other sports, well, they’re simply not worth mentioning. So what is China good at? Why are they good at it? And where does it all go wrong?

It was the 2006 Winter Olympics in Turin when from nowhere Han Xiaopeng turned up and struck gold in the men’s freestyle ski jumping. China’s first ever mens' Winter Olympics gold, but how? As unlikely as it at first seems, a bit of investigation reveals this to be a most Chinese sporting success story, combining as it does natural aptitude, intensive trainin'g and the application and adaptation of those efforts to the areas where they will be most effective. All the main ingredients, in fact, of a gold medal strategy that had the nation’s sports tsars predicting the record medal haul in 2008 years in advance of actual events, for Han had started life as an acrobat before switching to the slopes in 1995, in an event specifically targeted by China as part of a wider policy that had seen those who were not quite good enough to make the cut in gymnastics thrown into alternative sports.

 

One look at the gymnastics squad and it comes as no surprise that its castoffs are not automatically resigned to the sporting scrapheap. They picked up 18 medals (11 gold) in Beijing – more than Japan, Italy or France won in the entire Games. Why so good? Firstly there is the Chinese scouting policy. Talent selection officers scour the country looking to find young children with the best prospects. Rather than those with an interest in acrobatics, the decision is made along physical lines; kids with tiny hips and flexible limbs are plucked from elementary schools. Once discovered, they are then sent to state-run sports academies to be put through years of grueling six-day-week training regimes.

It’s not just the freestyle ski jumping team who benefit from the spill off either, as China’s diving (11 medals, seven gold) and trampolining (three medals, two gold) records testify. Nor is the policy restricted to gymnastics. Kids with lightening-quick reflexes are destined for table tennis or badminton, those with long legs, short torsos and large hands funneled into weightlifting, while the tallest are allotted to volleyball, basketball or handball squads. Of the nation’s 300 million youngsters, up to 400,000 sweat it out in 3,000 sports schools across the county. As former principal of the Shichahai Sports School in Beijing Xu Guangshu observed, “Just name the sport, if you give us enough money for proper training, we can create Olympic stars. We have so many children to choose from.”

Another two important elements of the gold medal strategy is a focus on events that are neglected by rivals and those that offer a profusion of medals. The former is most noticeable in the success of China’s women. While other nations often neglect and discriminate against their female athletes, China has invested heavily in theirs. The result: 57 medals in the 2008 Olympics to the men’s 42 (the 100th, for you pedants counting, came in the badminton mixed-doubles). The latter is probably most in evidence in shooting; with 45 medals available China has been targeting it from the get go, Xu Haifeng claiming the nation’s first-ever Olympic gold in the men’s 50m free pistol in Los Angeles in 1984. In 2008 shooting accounted for eight medals, including five golds.

So where does it all go wrong? The most glaring example is that of football. Countless column inches have been taken up by dissections of the Chinese game, citing everything from corruption in the domestic league to physiological unsuitability. Contributing factors these may be, but underlying it all lies something far more basic: the simple lack of a footballing culture in the country. This, in turn, is surely a symptom of the lack of facilities in which people can participate themselves. While in Brazil they play on the beach all day and in England jumpers for goalposts games can be seen in every park, in China schools and universities own two-thirds of all sporting grounds, most of which are not available to the public. As former CCTV5 commentator Huang Jianxiang remarked: “We just don’t have enough people playing sports like football. Around the world football is a game for poor kids. Here it is for the rich kids who can afford it.”

Statistics would suggest a similar explanation is behind further sporting shortcomings; a 2004 national report showed that only 15 percent of Chinese men aged between 15 and 35 actively play sport, compared to 50 percent in US. The legacy the Olympics has left China is yet to be seen, but until there are dramatic improvements in grassroots education and facilities for more than those selected by the sporting scouts, it is unlikely that their impressive showing at major games will reach to anything beyond that. A superficial sheen reflecting the success of a system and strategy that relies on the athletic servitude of a proportion of the population, rather than an indication of the sporting state of the nation.

 

 

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