Chinese athletes are undoubtedly performing well at their home Games in Beijing, but at what cost? Their success stems from a tightly regimented, some say at times brutal, athletic training system designed with one thing in mind: to win whatever the price, says the Epoch Times.
While Chinese athletes are pushed to the limits of mental and physical endurance, key regime spokespeople reveal the importance of Olympic gold for the continued legitimacy of one-party rule.
As an autocracy, the regime is able to impose fierce control on its athletes and their training. One gold medal is worth one thousand silvers, according to Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Olympic officials.
In the quest for gold, many Chinese athletes have had their education, personal finances, and even their family life taken over by the state. Children are recruited from a very young age, nation-wide, according to body type. British Olympic rower Matthew Pinsent told the BBC in 2005 that he saw children in a Beijing gymnasium being pushed to breaking point, yelled at, and said one young boy was clearly beaten.
Foreign media recently accused China of using underage gymnasts, which the regime denied. But children as young as four are among those recruited into the intensive gymnastic training squads.
The intensive training programmes are not designed to benefit the athletes as professionals, but to test them to extermes, meaning only the strongest will survive. It is very much a case of perform or perish: the outlook for a former athlete in today’s China is bleak. The China Sports Daily, an official Party mouthpiece, estimated that of the 300,000 retired athletes 80 per cent are unemployed, injured, or living in poverty. The regime promised them US$ 4 million in annual welfare which was supposed to start in 2007.
Lu Yuanzhen, a professor of sports sociology at the Academy of Sports Sciences at South China Normal University told The New York Times that if China’s athletes do poorly, “the entire nation and its people will lose face.”
(http://insidechinatoday.net/2008/08/14/what-is-the-price-of-success-for-chinas-athletes/)
