You are in > Editorial
Editorial
Feat of gold
Nevertheless. Nobody has missed the significance of this event. The boycott campaign against the host nation, exploiting its troubles in Tibet, came to naught. Even the Beijing smog, that by-product of The Chinese Communist Party's choice that the country would rise economically by accepting the re-location of the West's polluting industries to the territory of the People's Republic of China, was dispelled during the sixteen days of the games.
China's amazing success did not diminish the achievements of the competitors from other countries. Usain Bolt, Jamaica's flamboyant sprinter who began celebrating his 100 metres victory even before he crossed the finishing line, remarked later that his world record time was assisted by the unprecedented quality of the athletics track in Beijing's Birdcage Stadium. A key factor in the success of the USA's Michael Phelps in surmounting the swimming records of his predecessors was the fact that Beijing's Olympic pool was wider and deeper than the pools of previous Olympic hosts.
China's extravagant triumph encompassed organisation, architecture, mass spectacle, and of course sporting prowess. Li Yanping of Bloomberg News reported, on the day before the closing ceremony:
Host China will finish as the top gold-medal winner for the first time in Olympic history, becoming the only nation other than the U.S. and Soviet Union to win the most titles at a Summer Games since 1948 [...]
China, which has poured billions of dollars into sports in preparation for its first Olympics as host, ended the U.S. run of three straight Summer Games atop the gold-medal standings. The Chinese have won the most golds at an Olympics since the Soviet Union grabbed 55 at the 1988 Games in Seoul.
Though China's huge population was a factor in its success, that is far from the only factor. India, the only country in the world with a population size comparable to that of China, won a total of one gold and two bronze medals. China's 51 gold medals were obtained not only by means of the allocation of financial resources by the state, but through its centrally planned programme for developing talent. As The Economist noted:
This year China is celebrating the 30th anniversary of the launch of the “reform and opening” policies that have swept away state controls over much of economic and cultural life. But the sporting system, modelled on the Soviet Union’s, has survived.
The People's Republic of China had every reason to model its sports system on that of the USSR.
With the exception of the 1984 event in Los Angeles which it boycotted, the Soviet Union topped the medal tables at every Summer Olympic Games from 1972 to 1992 (despite the abolition of the USSR in 1991, the ex-Soviet nations except for the Baltic states competed as a single unified team at the 1992 Barcelona Olympics). Even at Beijing this year- if the gold medals won by the disunited nations of the former Soviet Union are added together, their total of 43 is higher than the 36 which were gained by the USA.
China produces its competitive sporting elite by selecting potential winners at an early age, and then carefully guiding and training them. As Pallavi Aiyar explained in The Hindu magazine:
China’s sports system is borrowed and adapted from that of the former Soviet Union. It relies on an extensive network of scouts and coaches who ferret out the best sporting talent from the country’s vast pool of youngsters studying in primary schools. Potential future champions are given detailed physical exams to test whether their bone structure and bodies are likely to develop in a way appropriate for a certain sport: height is key for volleyball, strength for weightlifting, agility for gymnastics.
Those chosen are then funnelled into a pyramid-like sports training structure.
At the top of the pyramid are some 300 elite sports training schools nationwide where 46,000 youngsters aged 6-18 undergo intensive daily training. Below this tier of top schools are another 3,000-odd, level-2 specialist sports schools with about 400,000 children in training. Finally at the base, six million youth hone their skills at 11,400 regular schools that also happen to specialise in one or another sporting category.
The Chinese approach has also focussed resources on the sports at which they are most likely to succeed. Pallavi Aiyar quoted Xie Qionghuan, former Deputy Secretary General of the Chinese Olympic Committee:
[China's] clever Olympics strategy has targeted sports “suitable to the physiques and talents of East Asian peoples.” He gave the examples of events such as table tennis, badminton and gymnastics, all of which China has come to excel in. These are sports that require quick reflexes and flexibility rather than brute physical strength and stamina.
Despite delivering Olympic success, there are negative aspects of the Chinese strategy. Pallavi Aiyar cites one critic:
Sports historian Zhao Yu holds that the government-led nature of sports in China leads to an over-emphasis on medals and winning, while developing grass-roots love of sports remains neglected. “We are not a real sporting country because we lack a popular base. Most Chinese kids in normal schools are purely focussed on academics and sports are rarely seen as beneficial or important. Our success in the Olympics is artificially engineered from the top,” he said.
Britain's state-led success
A not dissimilar critique can be made in respect of the other great national success in the Beijing medals table, that of Britain. The UK achieved its remarkable haul of 19 gold medals this year by means of a large increase in state funding, the targetting of particular sports, and the careful selection of athletes with potential to succeed.
Until 1997, Britain allocated a miserable £5 million per year of state funds for the Olympic sports; to train full-time, competitors had to rely on the vagaries of commercial sponsorship. The dismal effect of this policy of state neglect and reliance on market forces was exposed by the lacklustre overall performance of the British Olympic team at Atlanta in 1996, in which the UK won only a single gold medal.
Shaken by this result, embarassing in the extreme for a country which is not only one of the world's richest and most influential states, but which also regards itself, in the words of David Stevenson in Money Week, as the "country that invented many modern sports", the British government in 1997 began channelling money from the UK's National Lottery into preparations for Olympic competition. As David Bond related in the Daily Telegraph:
...by the time of the 2000 Sydney Olympics, the lottery had boosted the money available to sport by four times [...] Britain finished 10th with a total of 11 golds.
At the same time as helping pay for athletes, the lottery was also helping to pay for a new influx of foreign coaching talent. The introduction of improved scientific training methods – exemplified by the cycling team – and advanced sports medicine also had a major impact and [at the Athens Olympics in 2004] Britain showed Sydney was no fluke by finishing 10th again with nine golds.
But it was London’s successful bid to host the 2012 Games which has provided the new impetus being witnessed in Beijing. The need to field the strongest team possible on home soil four years from now forced ministers into releasing levels of funding never seen before in sport.
While still Chancellor, Gordon Brown announced in April 2006 a £500m funding package which could yet be topped up by £100m of private sector funding. That’s around £100m a year for sport, with 60 per cent now coming from the Treasury and the remainder from the lottery.
However, with the sole exception of track and field- which has attracted several million pounds in sponsorship and television deals- the idea that the private sector would top up the state investment with significant levels of commercial funding was a mirage. In an article in The Times, Ashling O’Connor noted:
A fifth of the money was supposed to come from the private sector, but consultants are struggling to raise it because of the credit crunch and competition from London 2012 marketing executives sucking up cash in a tight sponsorship market.
Nevertheless, the injection of money from the state, the investments centrally planned and rigorously focussed on athletes with realistic medal chances, proved to be enough to lift Britain to overall fourth place at Beijing. Despite his Conservatism, London Mayor Boris Johnson- who is the prospective host of the 2012 Summer Olympic Games- made no complaint about the way in which the result was achieved. Instead he proclaimed the British success as a victory against cynicism:
...the only sport at which we do not currently appear to be excelling is the national sport of running ourselves down. The armchair cynics - and I have occasionally been one - have been taking a terrific pasting.
Among the small minority of 'cynics' was Peter Hitchens of the Daily Mail, who expressed his disgust at the means by which much of the cash was obtained:
We achieve this by levying a tax on the sad, the deluded and the hopeless, called the National Lottery, and spending the money bamboozled out of these poor people on velodromes where cyclists dressed as spacemen whizz endlessly round under the cold gaze of ruthless trainers.
Peter Hitchens put forward a view which bears some comparison to that of Chinese sports historian Zhao Yu, who was quoted by Pallavi Aiyar in The Hindu magazine. Hitchens is distainful not only about the cultural aspect- the national triumphalism in a state-led success, which he feels is rather un-British; he is also affronted by the illusory nature of the physical achievement at the Olympics in comparison to the physical decline of the British people and their nation state. Hitchens complained:
Isn’t this British Olympic boasting all rather East German?
Huge state-directed resources have been devoted to gathering supposed glory at a world sports festival.
But these medals do not tell the truth about what sort of nation we are at all.
In fact, they are designed to cover up the truth – that we are an international failure, that our people are increasingly fat, unfit and unhealthy, that our schools continue to lose their sports grounds to development, and that we are, for the most part, one of the least competitive and sporty countries on Earth.
He added ruefully:
Our industries may have vanished, our fisheries may have been stolen, our streets may be increasingly dangerous. But, gosh, wow, we have lots of gold medals.
But however removed from daily reality our Olympic achievements are, we British can do with some successes. House values are falling, the cost of fuel and food is rising, along with unemployment.
The Chinese- though not yet as fat as the British, and nowhere near as fat as the Americans- are also getting fatter. But China's industries, though they will suffer somewhat from the current drop in Western demand, are growing rather than vanishing.
Britain's medals are a consolation prize. China's medals signify a step towards the real prize, that of superpower status and not merely on the sporting scene. And everybody who watched the 2008 Olympic Games knows it.