In August, when the Rio Olympics was in full swing, the Chinese Olympic team suffered a rather surprising and uncharacteristic depreciation in its medal collecting Olympic image.
China was beaten by both the U.S. and U.K in the medals table to finish third. Being bested by the U.S. wasn't seen as an unpleasant embarrassment by the Chinese; being beaten by the U.K was. The standard is high and the pressure higher for the unfurling Asian power. Chinese political elites, industry leaders, and the Communist Party want China to be seen as a perennial power, with equal prestige to the U.S. In every field of competition China will jostle for further equation in importance to U.S. prominence, and sports is a powerful platform for this soft power promotion. The Chinese athletes at Rio 2016 felt this expectation, this pressure like meat broiling in the sun; an unpleasant addition for the athletes in an already savagely high stakes competition.
Until 2016, China had finished in second place (to the U.S.) in the Olympics since 2004, and claimed its highest ever gold medal haul of 51 at the 2008 Beijing Games. Any country would be delighted to finish third in the Olympics, but not China. China expects more. China will not accept any success that doesn't match what the Chinese political, and sports echelons, deem satisfactory to China's global station; that global station is recognition fitting of a superpower. This is how China views itself and how it wants other nations to view it.
Presently, China will gracefully accept being second to the U.S., and only because the U.S. is a formidable sports world power. Chinese sports leaders have every desire to dethrone the U.S. from their pedestal.
China's frustration wasn't hidden well with the state broadcaster Xinhua tweeting that China was suffering an Olympic flop in badminton, diving, and gymnastics on Wednesday morning, August 17th, before deleting the tweet as frustration grew at Team China’s failure to replicate its past glories in Brazil.
China sent 416 athletes to Rio, its highest number to date; but the Chinese authorities failed to capitalize on such a large number of talented, regimented, and focused athletes obtaining a sweeping supply of gold medals.
These included former Olympic champion Du Li being denied a gold medal for shooting by American teenager Ginny Thrasher, the swimming champion Sun Yang bursting into tears after losing the 400m freestyle, and the badminton doubles teams being dumped out of the competition.
Why?
Too much pressure mixed with a disorganized, generic, and unspecified training policy.
Perhaps the most bitter taste for China to experience was their gymnasts failing to pick up medals in Rio, something that wasn't thought possible since China's last poor Olympics in 1984. Previously, Chinese gymnasts had picked up eleven gold medals at the 2008 Olympics and five at the London Games in 2012.
Beijing sees sporting prowess as a key soft power weapon and sensitivities over China’s performance at Rio 2016 led Chinese television censors to briefly stymie the BBC World broadcast about the plight of China’s gymnasts. The screen went black, as routinely occurs during stories considered politically inconvenient to the Communist Party. This is a reoccurring policy of state authorities who dislike the Chinese people seeing China fall short of the daily promoted narrative spun by the state. However, sitting at a bar called the Great Leap in Beijing's Sanlitun area, in Chaoyang District, I watched as CCTV 5 replayed Chinese successes in Rio for two weeks.
It was here I met an Englishman who has been hired by the Chinese government as a high-level strength and conditioning Olympic trainer for parts of the Chinese Olympic team. He's one of many. We began talking about the structure of Chinese national teams. I said that the pressure the Chinese society creates in all facets of its structure, from school to adulthood, bombards the average Chinese person with a petrifying anxiety about being embarrassed and fulfilling a dutiful pressure, a pressure to succeed, a need to achieve, but achieve what exactly?
Why, achieve for China of course, duh. Not for yourself but for the collective, the nation-state, the Party.
This gentleman explained to me that he, like many other ex-pat sports specialists, is being contracted as foreign specialized coaches and trainers to improve training regimes, structure, thinking and oversight. Even then, he told me he doesn't have to work a lot. Why? Because the Chinese management doesn't work a lot. He bluntly told me that the Chinese are disorganized, and I can attest to this because I'm currently living in Beijing. The Chinese culture is one of disorganization. He alerted me to alleged corruption among entrenched upper management and that the Chinese Olympic sports management hasn’t created a specific diet and nutrition program for different sports teams.
Instead, they actually have buffets in many of their training camps where athletes can eat - while good food - anything they want 3 or 4 times a day, with no portion control, no macro/micro control, and no caloric intake measurement, nothing specialized. Athletes could eat what they want, and to their hearts desire. This is problematic. Athletes may be eating too much or the wrong foods depending on if you're a weightlifter, gymnast, runner, and diver and so on.
They also don't have a specified training schedule for each sport or for focusing on different muscle groups, training schedules, or technical skills. The training is regimented towards training in the morning, having a nap from noon until 2pm or 3pm and train until 7 - 8pm... Every day. They don't rest, and just train every day. The foreign sports trainers are trying to change this structure, but the task they face is difficult because its been rigidly imposed for quite some time.
The Chinese training structure relied on the vast pool of prospective athletes instead of specific, technically focused, and personalized training approaches for each and every athlete, the idea being that eventually the rigorous and mass unspecified training would work with someone.
To refer back to Rio, one Chinese gymnast who finished fourth in the gymnastics final was bold enough to blame his performance due to pressure; and there's that cultural problem of pressure again. Too much pressure on Chinese citizens, through soft power platforms like sports, can take their toll.
In China, there are special Olympic academies - nothing unusual there. Many countries have sports excellence academies. What is unusual is that children can be taken out of school and put into these academies’ to focus solely on the specific sport they've shown potential and nascent ability in. At specific gymnast schools young children can be trained from 8 to 16 hours per day, even longer, every day. So much pressure.
And this cultural pressure, coupled with disorganization in their training methods, methods in need of reform, is why China still won't beat its Western rival. It's not about quantity, it's about quality.
