CHINA'S WILL TO WIN

tauringhuang.

By Mure Dickie  
Tuesday, July 29, 2008
  
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She
could not even swim. “When I first saw the boat, I was terrified,” recalls Yang, who was 14 when she was recruited in 1997. “Coming from a village, I was scared by any deep water – and now I had to go out paddling in a boat.” Yet in an illustration of the power of China's state-directed sports system, Yang became a world-class kayaker.

On a hot summer afternoon in Germany's Ruhr valley 10 years later, I saw her help power a four-woman kayak across 500m of the Duisburg regatta course in less than one minute and 39 seconds, fast enough to win China a coveted right to compete in the event at next month's Olympic Games.

Success in competitive sport rests on individual effort and talent, and Yang and her team-mates exemplified both as they drove toward the finish line, the blades of their paddles slicing into the still water in perfect time, haloes of glittering spray arcing up behind. But their booking of an Olympic berth was also a victory for China's juguo or “whole nation” sports system, a Communist party-run medal-winning machine that operates in large part on the assumption that the individual should serve the state.

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And if Yang would once have seemed an unlikely warrior for the juguo system, the man in charge of her team seemed an even more surprising choice: Josef Capousek, legendary coach of champion German canoeists and kayakers and one-time refugee from communism. Brought in to strengthen Chinese flatwater canoeing ahead of the nation's greatest-ever sporting challenge, the 2008 Beijing Olympics, the outspoken Capousek was already calling for more liberal training methods. How, I wondered on that day in Duisburg, would the juguo apparatus respond?

. . .

On August 27 1968, six days after the Soviets invaded, a 22-year-old Capousek fled Czechoslovakia with a single suitcase and a determination to live in a country where he could speak freely. In West Germany, Capousek cleaned nightclub toilets, worked as a photographer and enrolled as a student before becoming a German citizen and beginning a celebrated, decades-long career as coach to his adopted nation's all- conquering canoe teams. But in 2005, newly single after the end of a long love affair with Germany's most famous female kayaker, Capousek decided to live once more in an avowedly communist country, hired by China to ensure its paddlers would win Olympic gold before home crowds. “My ex-wife, she said: ‘Josef, you are crazy,' ” Capousek told me over an enormous plate of sausage and sauerkraut at a bustling German restaurant in Beijing. “ ‘In '68 you escaped Czechoslovakia and now you go to China.' ”

During Mao Zedong's 1966-76 cultural revolution, competitive sports were denounced as “trophyism”, athletes sent to labour in the countryside and officials persecuted to death. The late chairman's successors, however, see sporting success as a vital part of China's re-emergence as a global power, a mark of progress that can both unite and inspire the nation's people. And the ultimate measure of such success is seen as simple: the number of Olympic gold medals the country wins. But getting more golds requires building a presence in disciplines outside those, such as gymnastics and table tennis, where China has long been strong. So officials have targeted the more than 100 golds up for grabs in Olympic swimming, track and field, and water sports such as canoe and kayaking. By hiring Capousek, Beijing hoped to marry its ability to cultivate raw sporting talent with the German coach's mastery of modern training techniques.

Capousek, meanwhile, saw the job as a professional rather than a political challenge – and was inclined to see China as communist only in name. “They have, of course, a Communist party, but the average Chinese is thinking in a more capitalist way than all of us,” he told a press conference at last year's World Championships. Yet almost immediately after arriving in 2005, he began to challenge the traditions of the sports system, calling not just for changes to exercise and diet regimes, but also for athletes to be given greater personal freedom and more time off. For Chinese officials, such demands could only be unnerving. While specifics vary widely between teams, China's success in sport depends in large part on levels of discipline and control unthinkable for athletes of western nations. Elite competitors are routinely confined to accommodation shared with team-mates and banned from using mobile phones or the internet. Many go years without seeing their hometowns or parents. Sport is generally considered a form of national service, and athletes who retire from the system are described using the same word, tuiyi, as for a demobilised soldier.

Ya'an in south-western Sichuan province is a place so wet it's known as “Rain Town”. Showers followed me along the potted road that runs through misty gorges and ramshackle hamlets to the village in which Yang Yali was raised. Capousek's push for athletes to have more time off meant that Yang herself was home when I turned up during the National Day holiday last October. There was no road to Miaotia village and as I walked the muddy track, Yang came out to meet me with a spare umbrella, wearing her gold and red national team uniform tucked into rubber boots – the team uniform was more comfortable than farming clothes, she explained. And Miaotia was not the kind of place were people would stand on ceremony; it is a sleepy village where drying corn cobs hang from the eaves of old wooden homes and the paths are lined with scavenged slabs and broken millstones.

Yang used to walk about an hour to the middle school where the unusual length of her reach drew the attention of visiting sports officials. After a few days of physical tests suggested she was the perfect fit for a kayaker, she was sent to train with the provincial team.

The Yangs are reasonably prosperous by local standards, with an annexe off their earth-floored kitchen where they keep five pigs and cages of long-haired rabbits raised for their wool. But Yang's father, Yang Minghua, remembers 1997 as a tough year, with poor harvests forcing some village families to forage in the hills for food. Such hardship made it easy to see the chance of a sports career as something his daughter should seize. “She had it hard at one point, couldn't stick it out and wanted to come home,” her father said, puffing on a thick, hand-rolled cigarette of the pungent home-grown tobacco that he sells for Rmb15 (£1.10) a half-kilo. “As her parents, we had to support her and encourage her. We told her that village life is hard – don't be a farmer.”

Like many other parents of sports students, Yang's parents had to pay contributions toward her training costs until she became a formal salaried member of a government team. Yang was unusual in that her passage from pupil to provincial athlete was rapid. Indeed, it is a sign of the weakness of China's relatively new kayaking programme that she was nearly 15 when spotted. The exquisite balance required for paddlers of a racing canoe or kayak means that those first exposed to the sport as young as 10 can have a lasting edge.

. . .

The more established arms of China's sports system have mastered the art of getting them young, however, as I discovered when I visited the Li Xiaoshuang gymnastics school. The academy, in central Hubei Province's Xiantao city, is named after its most famous product, multiple Olympic champion Li Xiaoshuang. Other alumni include gold medallists Yang Wei and Zheng Lihui. And the pupils, mainly aged between four and eight, are taught a song that leaves them in no doubt of what is expected of them:

A strong fellow, a hero of iron,
Is not a crybaby, acts like a man,
That's the only kind the teacher likes.
You have to sweat like [Li] Xiaoshuang,
To be a hero some day,
Win the gold medal, be the champion,
Be famous everywhere in the world.
Yang Wei, Yang Wei,
Our nation's Yang Wei,
Zheng Lihui, Zheng Lihui,
Shining at the Olympics.

Starting before dawn, the Li Xiaoshuang school's 120 pupils, most of them paying boarders, muster in their pyjamas in its cavernous hall to start a round of sprints, hopping laps, squat-running and press-ups. After a few months of training, even the youngest easily balance on their hands for long periods. Schools like this are the lowest rung of the juguo system that China built in the 1950s to sift its population for sporting potential. Inspired by the example of the Soviet Union, then considered by Beijing a socialist “big brother”, the system aimed to supply sporting champions able to embody communism's ideological superiority. Rebuilt after the cultural revolution, it remains a sprawling multi-layered network spanning schools, multiple arms of government and the military.

For gymnastics, the first task is to find the right kind of bodies, says veteran coach Yan Yongping, reeling off a list of essential criteria including deep chests, small buttocks and straight arms and legs. “We select the seedlings, build the foundations and deliver the talent” to provincial gymnastic and diving teams, acrobat troupes and military trainers, says Yan, adding that pupils must have “determination, no fear of death and an ability to ‘eat bitterness' ”.

(To Be Continued)

tauringhuang.

The Yangs are reasonably prosperous by local standards, with an annexe off their earth-floored kitchen where they keep five pigs and cages of long-haired rabbits raised for their wool. But Yang's father, Yang Minghua, remembers 1997 as a tough year, with poor harvests forcing some village families to forage in the hills for food. Such hardship made it easy to see the chance of a sports career as something his daughter should seize. “She had it hard at one point, couldn't stick it out and wanted to come home,” her father said, puffing on a thick, hand-rolled cigarette of the pungent home-grown tobacco that he sells for Rmb15 (£1.10) a half-kilo. “As her parents, we had to support her and encourage her. We told her that village life is hard – don't be a farmer.”

Like many other parents of sports students, Yang's parents had to pay contributions toward her training costs until she became a formal salaried member of a government team. Yang was unusual in that her passage from pupil to provincial athlete was rapid. Indeed, it is a sign of the weakness of China's relatively new kayaking programme that she was nearly 15 when spotted. The exquisite balance required for paddlers of a racing canoe or kayak means that those first exposed to the sport as young as 10 can have a lasting edge.

. . .

tauringhuang.

The more established arms of China's sports system have mastered the art of getting them young, however, as I discovered when I visited the Li Xiaoshuang gymnastics school. The academy, in central Hubei Province's Xiantao city, is named after its most famous product, multiple Olympic champion Li Xiaoshuang. Other alumni include gold medallists Yang Wei and Zheng Lihui. And the pupils, mainly aged between four and eight, are taught a song that leaves them in no doubt of what is expected of them:

A strong fellow, a hero of iron,
Is not a crybaby, acts like a man,
That's the only kind the teacher likes.
You have to sweat like [Li] Xiaoshuang,
To be a hero some day,
Win the gold medal, be the champion,
Be famous everywhere in the world.
Yang Wei, Yang Wei,
Our nation's Yang Wei,
Zheng Lihui, Zheng Lihui,
Shining at the Olympics.

Starting before dawn, the Li Xiaoshuang school's 120 pupils, most of them paying boarders, muster in their pyjamas in its cavernous hall to start a round of sprints, hopping laps, squat-running and press-ups. After a few months of training, even the youngest easily balance on their hands for long periods. Schools like this are the lowest rung of the juguo system that China built in the 1950s to sift its population for sporting potential. Inspired by the example of the Soviet Union, then considered by Beijing a socialist “big brother”, the system aimed to supply sporting champions able to embody communism's ideological superiority. Rebuilt after the cultural revolution, it remains a sprawling multi-layered network spanning schools, multiple arms of government and the military.

For gymnastics, the first task is to find the right kind of bodies, says veteran coach Yan Yongping, reeling off a list of essential criteria including deep chests, small buttocks and straight arms and legs. “We select the seedlings, build the foundations and deliver the talent” to provincial gymnastic and diving teams, acrobat troupes and military trainers, says Yan, adding that pupils must have “determination, no fear of death and an ability to ‘eat bitterness' ”.

(To Be Continued)