Like the Soviet Union at the height of the cold war, China is looking to make a statement by winning more Summer Olympic gold medals than the United States. Both countries will doubtless honor the systems that they say produce victories — Chinese authoritarianism versus American liberty.
But China has added an interesting twist to an old cold war story. Unlike in the Soviet Union, capitalism has infiltrated nearly all aspects of Chinese life — except sports. Chinese compete like Adam Smith in the marketplace but like Vladimir Lenin in the arena.
As a result, the way Chinese experience sports is vastly different from the way that Americans do. We all know about Yao Ming and maybe a few others with colossal shoe contracts to match their stardom. But for the most part, Chinese athletes perform best in sports that few Chinese care about. This is a country without private guns but with crack sharpshooters. With few public pools but the best divers. Fencing, canoeing, women’s softball — China excels at these despite the fact that very few Chinese show an interest in them.
Why? Because the cabinet-level General Administration of Sport does its job well. It predicts which Olympic events could yield gold medals to China, allocates extra money to train athletes in those sports and dispatches scouts to locate children who fit certain sports molds. Those scouts may recruit a 6-year-old village girl with double-jointed elbows into a diving program, for instance, because a decade later she could arc into the water with a smaller splash.
That China is gaming the Olympic system to win maximum gold is not some conspiracy theory. After the Sydney Games in 2000, the government launched its so-called Operation 119. The figure refers to the number of gold medals available in individual sports with oddly high medal counts — canoeing/kayaking, for instance, has 16 golds up for grabs — in which China has traditionally performed poorly. Of China’s 32 gold medals in Athens in 2004, only four came in those 119 events. The surge in money for those events could push China to the top — at Athens, its gold medal haul was only four shy of America’s.
You could say China’s sports mandarins seek a good return on investment (maybe they’re not entirely Leninist). Their sports schools now train roughly 200,000 professional athletes, more girls than boys, with Olympic gold as the ultimate goal. In America’s self-selecting process, by contrast, tens of millions of children compete in the sports of their choice. Only the best move to higher levels, and their parents bear most of the cost.
Chinese sports fans have grown up within their system, with odd effects. I sat outside Workers’ Stadium in Beijing in 2002, for instance, to watch a big-screen broadcast of China’s national soccer team competing in its first World Cup. China played that year’s champion, Brazil. Sharing the field with such a power was an honor, yet, as Brazil built toward its 4-0 victory, spectators around me booed and tossed beer bottles. Typically, they saw no gallantry in a spirited loss.
This is the result of gold-oriented athletics. The majority of Chinese have no opportunity to play organized sports that profess to teach broader values. Some lucky schools in wealthy cities have basketball or soccer teams that compete in occasional government-run tournaments. My son joined an ice-hockey team put together by a group of hockey-loving Chinese parents who pooled their money to pay for weekly rink time. With no league to play in, however, the team disbanded after three years.
Nor will civic leagues in China develop along the lines of, say, Little League Baseball. Organizations of all sizes must register with the state, which fears that any regular gathering of people, from a kayak club to a sewing circle, could grow into an anti-government clique.
Sports leagues have an especially tough time because the government considers them training grounds for the Olympics. One privately owned basketball team in China’s state-controlled professional league refused to surrender its star point guard to the junior national squad in 2004 and was kicked out of the league. (Oddly enough, the team now plays in a professional league in Los Angeles under the name Beijing Aoshen Olympians.)
The Chinese government doesn’t release meaningful sports-budget statistics, but national expenditure is surely many times greater than the $130 million that the United States Olympic Committee spends each year. This has led some Chinese intellectuals to openly question whether a developing nation like China should spend so much on something so trivial as gold medals.
But think back to the American ice hockey team in 1980 and to those resounding chants of “U-S-A!” That unexpected triumph against the Soviet Union, and the gold medal that followed, showed our American grit and had a resounding effect on the national spirit. It put “Do you believe in miracles?” into the national conversation and gave us the heavy-rotation cable TV sports film, “Miracle on Ice.”
Beijing’s leaders didn’t create a world where Olympic success means more than a Nobel Prize or good lending libraries. But they inherited it. In the coming weeks, if they can displace America’s athletes at the top of the gold medal charts and China’s people accept a system in which only the most promising athletes get to enjoy organized sports, then the rest of the world has few grounds for complaint. After all, we Americans are supposed to be the good sports.
Matthew Forney, a former Beijing bureau chief for Time. Now, he is writing a book about raising his family in China.