China’s Olympic medal machine leaves thousands on the scrapheap

August 05, 2024 5 Reactions

The New York Post wrote about the Chinese sports school system, stating, "It doesn’t matter if the sports have mass appeal or if the youngsters have an interest – if they are deemed worthy, it is their duty to perform for the sake of the nation."

Since the demise of the Soviet Union, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) has emerged as a sports superpower challenging the United States. The two countries have very different systems.

In the US, sports programs are organic, allowing young people, with their parents' consent, to decide whether and in which sports to train. If they choose, they compete through successive levels, from local to regional, national, international, and eventually the Olympic qualifiers.

In contrast, in the PRC, sports, like everything else from the economy to society, are centrally planned as part of a larger strategy for China to assert itself on the world stage. Consequently, the Communist Party of China views its athletes as expendable soldiers, the vast majority of whom will be sacrificed to achieve the state's objective of winning Olympic gold. It is estimated that 80 percent of retired athletes end up with no education and/or disabled and jobless.

Unlike the US, which has an extensive system of scholastic and collegiate sports at public high schools and universities, Chinese schools generally do not have organised sports programs or teams. Instead, China relies on its sports school system to produce world-class athletes. This system includes between 2,000 and 3,000 live-in sports schools and hundreds of live-in martial arts schools, serving between 300,000 and 400,000 student athletes.

Manufactured

Local governments and talent scouts are tasked with testing children as young as six years old across the country to identify potential athletes and determine which sports they should pursue. The tests assess not only strength and stamina but also include X-rays and bone density testing, as well as measurements of hand size and the length of legs and arms. Similar assessments are conducted on the parents to see which children might have the necessary advantages for a particular sport.

Chinese professional basketball star Yao Ming, who played for the Houston Rockets of the National Basketball Association (NBA), is a genetic giant, standing 7 feet 6 inches (2.29 m) tall. His parents were both unusually tall — his father was 6'7" and his mother 6'2" — and both were high-level basketball players. It could be a coincidence that these two people found each other through their shared love of basketball, but it is also possible that Yao Ming was intentionally bred by the state.

At Shanghai University of Sport, where this author studied, many athletes were second-generation, the product of two selected athletes who married and had children. While it makes sense that people training at the same university would end up marrying, this is also part of the CCP’s plan to produce "super-sports-babies". Encouraging genetically gifted individuals to marry others with similar traits borders on eugenics.

In recent years, DNA testing has been added to the athlete selection criteria. The CCP has been collecting DNA samples from citizens without permission to create the world’s largest genome database. They have gathered DNA from Mongols and Tibetans in hopes of creating “super soldiers” who can endure privations and combat at high altitudes, such as the conflict in Arunachal Pradesh between China and India. It is not a stretch to believe that China will begin, or has already begun, creating genetically superior athletes.

Once promising children are identified, they are given a spot in a sports school where they will live and train in a particular sport up to three times a day, six days a week, from first through twelfth grade.

In interviews with sports university students, they were asked if they had an interest in the sport they had spent the last 16 years practising prior to their selection. Most came from small, poor, rural communities where no one had ever heard of fencing and no one knew how to swim or wrestle. Unsurprisingly, almost none had any experience or knowledge of the sport they wound up studying, unless they were second-generation athletes.

Being selected meant growing up seeing their parents only once or twice a year. Theoretically, the athletes or their parents could have opted out, but they were told that the choice was for the good of the nation.

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When you enter a Chinese sports school, you are immediately confronted by patriotic propaganda, with signs reading, "BE POSITIVE, WORK HARD, CLIMB THE HIGH MOUNTAIN, WIN GLORY FOR THE COUNTRY." Schools and universities in China still have self-criticism boards, a throwback to the Cultural Revolution. At Weifang City Sports School, one of the boards read, "Learn from our Comrades and Create a New and Glorious Olympics."

Beatings and other forms of abuse are extremely common, with many coaches carrying sticks to punish students whose performance fails to bring glory to the nation.

Precarious positions

The daily routine at sports schools varies, but generally includes two to three training sessions per day, along with an afternoon nap. Dinner follows the afternoon training, and then showers. By law, students must log three hours of academic classes per day, usually from 7 pm to 10 pm. After a full day of training, the exhausted athletes often sleep through their lessons, learning nothing.

Despite the poor education in sports schools, students still have to meet certain graduation requirements, which many fail to do either due to low academic levels or injuries. As a result, they often end up without even a high school diploma because they are academically unqualified to transfer to a standard government school.

Once the athletes reach high school, they need to accumulate a certain number of points by winning national or international medals to qualify for the national teams, where they receive a government salary — a goal achieved by fewer than 3 percent. The long-term objective of these athletes is to secure one of the limited spots on the Chinese Olympic Team.

Those who fail to make a national team or qualify for the Olympics right out of high school may secure a position at one of the country’s 10 sports universities. However, admissions requirements include a composite score of academic classes and athletic achievements. Sports school students generally have extremely low academic levels compared to students at other universities, but if they have high scores in athletics, they may be admitted. A mediocre athlete with low academics would not.

The vast majority of students graduating from a sports school will achieve neither a spot on the national teams nor admission to a sports university, leaving them with no skills, no education, and no future. Most will become security guards, labourers, or take on other low-level jobs.

For those admitted to a sports university, if they are on a "professional" sports track, as it is called in China, they will be cut if their performance drops or if they are injured. Once cut from the team, they are also ejected from the university. At that point, they join the ranks of former athletes looking for jobs.

Those who graduate from a sports university will hold a degree that might allow them to work as a coach or secure a government job as a physical education teacher. Wrestlers, San Da fighters, karate fighters, judoka, boxers, and other martial arts majors often aspire to careers in the police. However, this represents an extremely small percentage of the kids who entered sports school at age six.

The vast majority of Chinese athletes have no job skills and many have only a fifth-grade reading level. The media often criticise America’s football and basketball programs, highlighting athletes who end up with no education and no job skills. While this does happen, it is not nearly on the scale seen in China, where hundreds of thousands of kids wind up with nothing after years or even decades of training for the glory of the Communist Party.

In the US, athletes in such desperate straits are a minority. Student athletes are required to attend the same classes as academic students and have roughly the same university graduation rate as non-athletes, about 69 percent. If they fail to achieve their sports dreams of becoming professionals or Olympians, American athletes have a degree and can obtain a job. In contrast, according to China Sports Daily, 80 percent of China’s 300,000 retired athletes are unemployed, disabled, and poor.

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Antonio Graceffo, PhD, China-MBA MBA, is a China economic analyst teaching economics at the American University in Mongolia. He has spent 20 years in Asia and is the author of six books about China. His writing has appeared in The Diplomat, South China Morning Post, Jamestown Foundation China Brief, Penthouse, Shanghai Institute of American Studies, Epoch Times, War on the Rocks, Just the News, and Black Belt Magazine.

Image credit: Pexels

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John Joseph commented 2024-08-07 14:49:54 +1000

How so very….Utilitarian.
David Page commented 2024-08-06 09:47:00 +1000

None of this excused the rudeness shown to Chinese athletes by the some of the French athletes. The French, after all, were the hosts.
Marty Hayden commented 2024-08-05 23:13:18 +1000

Unfortunately the CCP (communist Chinese party) is nothing short of evil. And now they are genetically breeding super athletes? “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing,”
Michael Cook followed this page 2024-08-05 20:49:42 +1000
Antonio Graceffo published this page in The Latest 2024-08-05 20:46:50 +1000

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