China’s Olympic Goal: The Most Golds, at Any Cost

TOKYO — Six days every week since she was 12 years previous, with only some days of time away every year, Hou Zhihui has been pushed by one mission: heaving greater than double her physique weight into the air.

On Saturday, on the Tokyo Olympics, Hou’s dedication — sequestered from her household, dogged by close to fixed ache — paid off. She received gold within the 49-kilogram division and shattered three Olympic information, a part of a fearsome Chinese language girls’s weight lifting squad that aimed to comb each weight class it was contesting.

“The Chinese language weight lifting staff may be very cohesive, and the help from your entire staff is superb,” Hou, 24, mentioned after successful gold. “The one factor we athletes take into consideration is specializing in coaching.”

China’s sports activities meeting line is designed for one goal: churning out gold medals for the glory of the nation. Silver and bronze barely rely. By fielding 413 athletes in Tokyo, the most important quantity because the Beijing Video games in 2008, China goals to land on the prime of the gold medal rely — even when the Chinese language public is more and more cautious of the sacrifices made by particular person athletes.

“We should resolutely guarantee we’re first in gold medals,” Gou Zhongwen, the top of the Chinese language Olympic Committee, mentioned on the eve of the Tokyo Olympics.

Rooted within the Soviet mannequin, the Chinese language system depends on the state to scout tens of 1000’s of youngsters for full-time coaching at greater than 2,000 government-run sports activities colleges. To maximise its golden harvest, Beijing has centered on much less distinguished sports activities which might be underfunded within the West or sports activities that supply a number of Olympic gold medals.

It’s no coincidence that just about 75 % of the Olympic golds China has received since 1984 are in simply six sports activities: desk tennis, taking pictures, diving, badminton, gymnastics and weight lifting. Greater than two-thirds of China’s golds have come courtesy of feminine champions, and practically 70 % of its Tokyo delegation are girls.

Ladies’s weight lifting, which turned a medal sport on the 2000 Sydney Video games, was an excellent goal for Beijing’s gold medal technique. The game is a distinct segment pursuit for many athletic powerhouses, which means that feminine lifters within the West should scramble for funding. And with a number of weight courses, weight lifting presents up 4 potential golds.

For Beijing’s sports activities czars, it didn’t matter that weight lifting has no mass enchantment in China or that the preteen women funneled into the system had no concept that such a sport even existed. On the weight lifting nationwide staff’s coaching middle in Beijing, an enormous Chinese language flag covers a whole wall, reminding lifters that their responsibility is to nation, to not self.

“The system is very environment friendly,” mentioned Li Hao, the top of the load lifting squad on the 2016 Video games in Rio de Janeiro and the present director of the antidoping division on the Heart for Weight Lifting, Wrestling and Judo on the Basic Administration of Sport of China. “It’s in all probability why our weight lifting is extra superior than different nations and areas.”

Most nations are longing for Olympic glory. The USA and the Soviet Union used the Video games as a proxy Chilly Warfare battleground. However Beijing’s obsession with gold is tied up within the very founding in 1949 of the Individuals’s Republic of China, which was seen as a revolutionary pressure that might reverse centuries of decay and defeat by international powers.

The primary essay that Chairman Mao Zedong, the chief of the Communist revolution, wrote was in regards to the want for a rustic dismissed as “the sick man of Asia” to develop its muscle.

For many years, although, politics received in the way in which of Olympic achievement. As a result of its rival Taiwan competed within the Video games because the Republic of China, Beijing boycotted the Summer time Video games till 1984, when Taiwan was renamed Chinese language Taipei for Olympic competitors.

In 1988, China received 5 Olympic golds. 20 years later, when Beijing hosted the Video games, it surpassed the US to prime the gold rely.

London 2012, although, was a letdown and Rio 2016 a much bigger disappointment, as China got here in third behind the US and Britain.

Again at dwelling, sports activities officers redoubled their efforts, even when a rising variety of middle-class dad and mom had been unwilling handy their youngsters to the state for grooming as athletes. China was now not a desperately poor nation the place the promise of stuffed rice bowls made authorities sports activities colleges alluring. Beijing acknowledged that sports activities shouldn’t be reserved for elite athletes, that each little one deserved to run, play and kick a ball.

And there was rising recognition that for each Olympic champion, tens of 1000’s of different youngsters wouldn’t make it. For these castoff athletes, life is usually troublesome: little training, broken our bodies, few profession prospects exterior the sports activities system.

Nonetheless, Beijing continued with its plans, manufacturing packages in taekwondo, canoeing, crusing and extra. Kids who might stack bullets on the palms of their palms had been dispatched to archery. Nation women with spectacular wingspans had been directed to weight lifting.

“Kids from rural areas or from households that aren’t so good economically, they adapt nicely to the hardships,” Li, the Beijing sports activities official, mentioned of the best candidate for weight lifting.

Beijing’s focus has been on sports activities that may be perfected with rote routines, quite than those who contain an unpredictable interaction of a number of athletes. Except for girls’s volleyball, China has by no means received Olympic gold in a big staff sport.

In Tokyo, Beijing’s technique had delivered, by noon Thursday, 14 gold medals, edging out the US and Japan for the lead. China captured the first gold of the Games, within the girls’s 10-meter air rifle, and scored its first fencing victory. (The sports activities through which China is dominant are clustered within the first week of the Video games, whereas the US’ strengths are unfold out.)

However in a few of China’s conventional strongholds, like desk tennis, diving and weight lifting, hopes of golden sweeps didn’t materialize. There have been different disappointments earlier than the Video games started. A prime swimmer was banned due to doping. The lads’s soccer, volleyball and basketball groups did not qualify.

The sacrifices made by China’s Olympians are intense. Educational instruction in sports activities colleges stays paltry, and a few world champions share dorm rooms with others. They’re fortunate to see their household just a few instances a yr.

After the Chinese language lifter Liao Qiuyun competed within the 55-kilogram weight division on Monday, it was a journalist from her dwelling province who handed her a message from her dad and mom.

For feminine weight lifters, the prices of China’s sports activities system are that a lot larger. Whereas divers and gymnasts should share proceeds from endorsement offers with the state, at the least they’ll leverage their success after retirement. However advertisers don’t are usually drawn to feminine weight lifters.

In a single case, a former nationwide champion was so impoverished after retirement that she ended up toiling in a public bathhouse. She grew a beard, which she mentioned was the results of a doping routine pressured upon her as a younger athlete.

In 2017, after previous samples had been re-examined, three of China’s 4 girls’s weight lifting golds on the 2008 Beijing Olympics had been revoked as a result of the assessments discovered banned substances.

Doping is rampant in weight lifting, and China is hardly the one nation to have been caught. However a person making the choice to take medicine will not be the identical as youngsters being directed to take action by the state.

For the Chinese language sports activities machine, all these punishing years of effort can nonetheless be foiled within the warmth of Olympic competitors. On Monday in Tokyo, Liao, the lifter within the 55-kilogram division, started the occasion because the reigning world champion. Two days earlier than, in a lighter weight class, Hou had taken the gold.

Liao marched onto the stage on Monday with an expression that hovered between resolve and resignation. Within the final moments of competitors, a Philippine rival surpassed her to claim gold.

Afterward, Liao, 26, stood crying, her breath jagged. Her coach wrapped her arm round Liao and sobbed, too. Finally, Liao, red-eyed, took questions from Chinese language reporters. A silver was an excellent achievement, one journalist mentioned. Liao regarded on the ground.

“As we speak, I did my greatest,” she mentioned. The tears flowed once more.

The trauma of all these years preventing the unforgiving pressure of mass and gravity weighed on Liao’s physique.

“They’ve been there for years,” she mentioned of her accidents. “Over and over.”

However not like Simone Biles or Naomi Osaka, high-profile Olympians who’ve spoken of the emotional pressure of a lot strain, Liao didn’t tackle the psychological toll of what she has accomplished, day after day, since she was slightly lady.

Liao sighed. She wiped her eyes with the sleeve of her uniform. The Nationwide Video games had been arising, she mentioned, and she or he can be representing her dwelling province of Hunan. Sports activities funding for China’s provinces relies upon partly on how every does within the Nationwide Video games.

The Olympics had been over for her. She had a brand new job to do.

Amy Chang Chien contributed reporting.