Olympic Gold Brings Hope for Sports Reform

From issue no. 382 August 25 2008
Original article: [Chinese]

Several reserved statements by Cui Dalin, deputy chief of the General Administration of Sports, before and after the Olympic games were intended to leave room for the future. He emphasized that China was still number two in sports and that it was still not a great sports power.

In fact, with 32 gold medals in Athens, it had already revealed itself as exactly that kind of power. This time, after coming in first, we relish in saying our sports are "elite", and that our "gold metal strategy" has succeeded.

Herein we congratulate the Chinese Sports Delegations on their unprecedented progress and salute the athletes who competed fairly to meet personal challenges and achieve Olympic honor.

However, what Cui said was still reasonable. Being "number one in sports" only meant that China won the most gold medals.

This aside, it still lagged far behind in public athleticism, popular recreational sports, and physical education in the schools, and the population of athletes relative to the total population was still low. These are the universal standards by which the level of sports in a nation are measured.

Everyone knows that our schools and communities still lack good sports equipment and fields. Even the Ministry of Education, after conducting surveys, confirmed that Chinese adolescents had become less healthy since 1985. However, the problems in Chinese sports underneath the hood is far from limited to these phenomena.

When China returned to the Olympics in the early years of reform and opening-up, the value of sports and how they were promoted were hitched to the broader Chinese dream for the nation to ascend to greatness. The idea "leave Asia, reinvigorate China" was put forward by students of Beijing University during that period, when the Chinese football team encountered South Korea in the 1984 Olympic football competition.

To fulfill this dream, the government scraped funds together to give new precedence to the cultivation of "elite" athletes--a strategy that has also been adopted by other countries, such as Japan and South Korea.

There are also countries whose Olympic medals don't correlate with their GNP, such as Kenya and Jamaica. However, their success is more the result of an industry concentration than the government-planning system of the former Soviet Union. What most developed countries do today is only invest in school sports and popular sports, leaving competitive sports to be commercialized.

China has always been transfixed with surpassing the US. However, many Chinese may not know that in the US, there isn't any government body dedicated to sports, neither are there any professional sport teams under any local government. Sports schools are rare. Instead of government appropriation, the United State Olympic Committee sustains itself through donations, corporate sponsors, and business revenues.

In the US, there are school sports, amateur competitive sports, professional sports, and recreational sports. Professional sports are all commercial-driven or make great profits. However, sports such as table tennis, badminton, diving and weight lifting can't be commercialized because of lack of audience, and therefore aren't the country's strong points. Government funds for sports are mainly spent on schools and communities, which are the foundation for professional sports and amateur competitive sports.

Under this system, though the number of gold medals won by American athletes fluctuates at times, the number of the Games' participants is much more remarkable, and has significantly promoted health and exercise in America. According to Xinhua News Agency, Finland, with a population of over 5 million, has more than 7,000 sports clubs; in other western countries, one-third of the population are members of local sports clubs. To some extent, these countries deserve the reputation of the "number one in sports".

Today, our efforts at the Olympic Games have been acknowledged by the world and brought the returns we sought. We finally ascended to the top rank of the Olympic gold metal list.

At the same time, Chinese attitudes towards sports have changed as well. During the Games, Du Li, a famous shooting player, missed the first gold metal in the 10-meter air rifle shooting competition; Liu Xiang quit the 110 meter hurdles competition; and Lang Ping, former leader and assistant coach of China's volleyball team, coached the American team to defeat China for the gold. But Chinese can calmly accept those twists, and their sensitivity toward winning gold metals has already greatly abated.

The emergence of the bourgeoise and rich circles have paved the way for the development of a domestic sports industry.

It is high time for reform.

It is high time to change that competitive sports are more important than recreational ones.

It is high time to strengthen the sports infrastructure of our schools and popularized health and exercise.

It is high time that government changed its policy of monopolizing competitive sports.

If our citizens' sports lives improve remarkably, even if China's football can't walk out of Asia, it won't stand in the way of a national renaissance.