Sunday, August 10, 2008 Sun.Star Essay: Politics in sports By Erma M. Cuizon
ARE you the type who’d make the decision for your kid as to what he’s capable of and what he’d grow up to be? Then it’s your business, even though you say it’s for his sake that you make certain decisions about the course he has to take.
If he wants to be a sports man, he’d be something like the answer to set expectations of China as a nation while the Beijing Olympic opens like a salute to the Chinese sports system. For there’s such a thing called a “sports system” in China where government sports schools train thousands of sports rookies (promising to the hopeful nation, not necessarily to themselves) under both Chinese coaches and hired foreign sports trainors.
Training in sports is, of course, part of the game and it starts at a rigid early point. So coaches would have to be firm and even despotic, all for the sought-after triumph in the name of China.
Long ago, I came across an article on the Chinese ballet and the way the dancers did it so well, you’d wonder why and how the skill was arrived at. In the same book, I learned of the rigid training undertaken by inflexible dance maestros starting in the very early years of the dancer’s life---just over the baby stage. Thus, I knew it wasn’t just art. As for the parents, they hardly had voice and they would normally just give in to glory and fame for the country.
Sports, on the other hand, is art at a certain point but in China it has grown into something bigger during the training. It may not stay long as art, sports could grow as effective international politics.
China simmered on the way to and at the opening of the 29th Olympiad. It has gone out of its way to make the affair a triumph, as though the entire act of putting things together as a good organizer would be like winning the games, the act the total competition itself.
Thus, you’ve come across a lot of articles reporting the preparations, now the Olympiad itself, and of how the government of China seems to have invested heart and soul, mind and body, on the Beijing games to come out as top winner in feats we might never have seen before. There are some 3,000 state-run athletics schools training over 400,000 girls and boys who get to see their parents for only two weeks in one year.
This is not only for the games this year but the years to come as China has set itself to do ever since it rejoined the Olympic games in 1980 after two decades of boycott.
The sportive fate begins with the discovery of the future sportsman (ertswhile a farmer’s small boy, say) in some isolated farms by some sports officials who go around the country to spot the perfect sports specimen, such as one with “wide shoulders, a calm demeanor and good vision” as future competitive archer, or of another with the right “shoulder width, thigh length and waist circumference.” Then the candidates for archery and weight-lifting, in this case, are taken away from the parents and they grow up trapped in the sports system whether they like it or not.
One 14-year-old trainee at the Weifang City Sports School, Chen Yun, talked in an interview by writer Hannah Beech about what her hobbies were. “Weight-lifting,” the girl said. What else did she want to do, besides weight-lift, the author asked. “Weight-lifting,” said the girl.
Runner Wang Ting, 15, was asked during a quick interview what she did when she wasn’t training. “I run and I sleep.”
Recently in an international television report, I saw girls of about six and seven years old training for gymnastics in a Chinese government sports school. Their bodies were swung and twisted by their coach as required in the training. Most of them looked somber, one pitiful small girl had tears quietly running down her cheeks even as she was performing the stunts.
The vision is to see the promising children grow up to be the best in the game in the world, for the sake of the country. It’s the same outlook North Koreans and Cubans are familiar with.
Prove yourself for the sake of the nation or else.
