The Hindu : Sport / Olympic Games : China prepares for bigger things in Beijing-2008

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Saturday, Aug 28, 2004

Sport

Sport - Olympic Games

China prepares for bigger things in Beijing-2008

By Christopher Clarey

ATHENS, AUG. 27. It was easy to see that Lithuania was a better basketball team than China in the Olympic quarterfinals on Thursday, but it was also easy to fill in the blanks and the seats with future Olympics in mind: to imagine Yao Ming with a better, stronger supporting cast and to imagine the stands that were dotted with Chinese flags here in Athens becoming a sea of national colours in Beijing in four years.

The face of the Olympics is changing, even before Gianna Angelopoulos-Daskalaki and the rest of the Athens organisers pass the torch to the Chinese delegation at Sunday's closing ceremony.

Deep into the second week, China is running a very close second to the United States in the gold-medal count.

``That's very surprising for me,'' said Yao, China's towering centre, as he answered questions in his improving English after Lithuania's 95-75 victory.

There will be no closing the medal gap in basketball, as China's defeat eliminated it from medal contention while the United States and the remnants of its Dream Team aura advanced to the semifinals with a 102-94 victory over Spain.

But what happened on Thursday in the Olympic Indoor Hall hardly removed the shine from China's overall performance here or from its prospects, as its government continues to pour funding into elite sports and its 1.2 billion inhabitants inch their way toward affluence and leisure time.

``As we say in China, the beans are out of the bottle,'' Yao said.

So what if it doesn't quite translate. The concept is clear, and it may be time for the outside, sports-obsessed world to start learning a lot more Chinese phrases in the original.

Del Harris, the American coach of the Chinese basketball team here, has certainly learned a bit in his three months in charge: about 1,000 Mandarin words in all, by his estimation.

``People at first said I was trying to bring the NBA to China; not at all; that doesn't work,'' said Harris, a former NBA head coach and a current assistant with the Dallas Mavericks who has also coached Puerto Rico and Canada. ``I'm trying to teach them what a high level of international basketball is and try to get them out of Asian basketball culture and into the international basketball culture.''

Future prospects

International companies have been eagerly riding the learning curve for years, investing in China and counting on future profits. Global sports players have been dipping their toes in, too. The soccer teams Manchester United and Real Madrid have made exhibition tours to China; the NBA will stage pre-season games there in October involving Yao and his Houston Rockets. The men's tennis tour will move its year-end championships to Shanghai for three years at least, beginning in 2005.

But it isn't only about what China will do for western sports entities; it's about how China will change the way the west experiences international sports. The next Summer Olympics — China's first opportunity to be host to a global sporting event — are only the most obvious example. But it is easy to imagine that, as the level of affluence in China rises along with China's sporting results, there will be an increasing Chinese flavour at major international events around the world.

With its huge diaspora, China already had a strong presence here, and when Zhang Ning won her gold medal in women's badminton, many of the young people shouting for her and holding up banners were young Chinese studying in Greece. That trend and others are only going to accelerate. At the Olympics in Barcelona in 1992, Chinese reporters were a tiny minority at news conferences with Chinese medal winners. On Thursday, as Harris answered questions, the vast majority of reporters in the room were from China.

Yao's NBA debut in 2002 was reportedly viewed by 287 million Chinese households and a survey last year, funded in part by an international shoe company, found that 93 percent of Chinese males between 13 and 25 claim to have interest in basketball and watch NBA games on television.

``Sports mean a great deal to Chinese culture,'' said Harris, the first foreigner to coach China's basketball team. ``All sports do, not just basketball, but now they are really focused on basketball.''

No to drugs

There have been other sea changes, including the Chinese government's adoption of a hard-line approach to the use of performance-enhancing drugs.

In 1993, when the world swimming championships were staged in Rome, there was resentment and suspicion on the pool deck as the Chinese women dominated the meet with a team featuring multiple medallists with massive shoulders, deep voices and heavy acne.

The doubts turned out to be well-founded as several Chinese swimmers later tested positive for banned substances. But Chinese authorities radically shifted priorities, organising their own testing to weed out cheaters and creating real penalties.

There were reasons for this that were not selfless, one being the government's desire to stage the 2008 Games. With that vote looming, the Chinese team withdrew 27 athletes with dubious test results from its Olympic roster before the 2000 Games in Sydney.

But even after the International Olympic Committee vote in 2001 in favour of Beijing, the Chinese have continued to emphasize anti-doping. The country, like France, now has an anti-doping law, and its accredited doping laboratory in Beijing is considered state of the art. According to the French newspaper Le Monde, Chinese athletes who test positive in Athens are subject to an 80,000 yuan ($9,861) fine: the same amount that athletes receive from the government as a gold-medal bonus.

The list of athletes who have tested positive shortly before or during the Athens Games includes competitors from Greece, Russia, Hungary, India, Kenya, Spain, Ireland and Switzerland but not one Chinese.

Individual events

But even with a delegation that no longer raises widespread suspicion and even with 25 gold medals and 54 overall, the Chinese are not yet in full self-congratulatory mode. Their Olympic success remains largely confined to individual sports, many of them relatively minor or quite regional in popularity.

Six of their gold medals came in badminton and table tennis; another nine in weightlifting and shooting. Four have come in diving, a sport with an international talent pool but which lacks the same sort of global prestige and audience as major team sports like basketball and soccer or the Olympic showcase sports of track and field and swimming.

China did win its first gold in tennis here, but it still has pockets of weakness and has yet to win a major team sport at any Olympics, something which Chinese officials had hoped to correct in Athens.

But they are improving. Take it from Yao, whose team defeated defending world champion Serbia and Montenegro here with one eye on Athens and the other on Beijing. ``Young players grow up; new players come in,'' Yao said. ``You can see that the four years, 2000 to 2004, those made a huge difference in world basketball. The European basketball was very surprising. They can beat the U.S. They play perfect basketball. That's the word I want to use. We need to work harder to take big steps.''

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