By Ian Ransom
LONDON, Aug 13 (Reuters) – China’s sports mandarins had
warned before the London Olympics that their athletes would
struggle to match the table-topping gold medal haul they enjoyed
in Beijing. They will take little comfort in being proved right.
China amassed 38 gold medals in London to reaffirm its
status as a sporting superpower but finished behind the
Americans, who will take 46 titles back to the United States.
Reeled in by the U.S. athletics team in the final days, the
East Asian power, which won 51 golds at Beijing, immediately
spoke of plans to improve its “regular” performance.
London was at times a tumultuous Games for the Chinese
delegation.
They were angered by suspicions of doping in their swimming
programme, dragged into scandal by their badminton team and
stunned by the second successive Olympic failure of Liu Xiang.
China has long regarded Olympic success as going
hand-in-hand with economic clout and global influence and
delegation chief Liu Peng said the team had a lot of work to do
before the 2016 Rio Games and to “enlarge its international
impact”.
Liu, who described the performance as “satisfactory”, said
other countries were catching up to China in sports like table
tennis, badminton, diving, gymnastics and weightlifting, while
the Chinese were not making enough progress in other sports.
“In track and field, swimming, cycling and other events we
have achieved obvious progress but there is still quite a big
gap between us and the strong sporting nations,” Liu told a news
conference on Sunday.
“Although we played well in our traditional best disciplines
and events, other countries are catching up quite rapidly and we
are facing more severe challenges.
“We need to reflect carefully on these problems and learn
more and make a bigger effort to improve… We know we have a
lot more work to do and our task is still very huge.”
China’s main state-run newspapers on Monday largely brushed
aside any worries about the medal tally.
Communist Party mouthpiece the People’s Daily lauded the
athletes’ performance as the result of “scientific training,
solid preparation and tenacious hard work”.
But sister paper the Global Times, a widely read and
influential tabloid, said most Chinese were not upset at coming
second this time around.
“Few Chinese really support the idea of winning gold medals
at any price,” it wrote in an editorial.
DOPING AND DISCONTENT
Liu, who has a history of playing down expectations, said
there were eight events in London in which China won gold medals
for the first time and the team improved markedly in swimming,
winning five golds compared to one in Beijing.
But a series of doping cases in the 1990s have overshadowed
China’s achievements in the pool over the past decade and cast a
pall over young swimmers Sun Yang and Ye Shiwen at London.
Sun, 20, became China’s first male Olympic swimming champion
after winning the 400 metres freestyle then obliterated his own
world record to win the 1500m freestyle, becoming the first man
in 32 years to bag the distance double.
Ye, 16, shaved five seconds off her personal best to win the
400m individual medley with a world record time, then won the
200m individual medley, but her joy was tempered by suspicions
of doping aired by an American swimming coach in the British
media.
Liu described China’s performance in its traditional
strengths as “regular”, sweeping all four golds in table tennis
for the second successive Games and winning six out of eight
diving titles.
Their five-gold sweep of the badminton tournament was
overshadowed by the expulsion of their world champion women’s
doubles pair Yu Yang and Wang Xiaoli.
The Chinese and three other pairs from the South Korean and
Indonesian teams were disqualified for deliberately playing to
lose their matches to secure a more favourable position in the
tournament’s knockout phase.
China’s head badminton coach took the blame for the negative
tactics that riled the Wembley Arena crowd and publicly
apologised with his players on Chinese state television.
With allegations of poor sportsmanship dogging the team,
other Chinese teams slammed officials they felt had cost them
certain gold medals.
The team’s gymnastics head coach fumed at judges when
retiring Beijing champion Chen Yibing missed out on the rings
gold medal, while the track cycling team demanded a review of a
relegation that cost their women the team sprint gold.
Far more galling for the Chinese, however, was Liu Xiang’s
stunning failure in the 110m hurdles.
China’s first man to win a track gold medal at the 2004
Athens Games, Liu clattered into the first hurdle of his opening
heat in a haunting echo of his ill-fated Beijing title defence.
The sight of the trailblazer sprawled on the track was
hardly inspiring to his track and field team mates and the
athletics team won just one gold through Chen Ding, who won the
men’s 20km walk in a world record time.
China’s gold medal hauls in their traditionally strong
gymnastics, shooting and weightlifting events were down on their
Beijing totals, which will prompt some soul-searching over the
effectiveness of the country’s Soviet-style sports system.
Chinese bloggers have expressed concerns about damaged
athletes crashing under the pressure to win gold after
sacrificing their childhoods for the state.
This was highlighted when it was revealed that diving gold
medallist Wu Minxia was not told of her grandparents’ deaths or
her mother’s battle with cancer, fearing it would distract her.
“The system is disastrous,” wrote one user on China’s
Twitter-like microblogging service Sina Weibo.
“The budding young talents are shut up in closed training
schools from a young age and apart from their own events, almost
have no other life skills.”
