Here's the thing about China and the Olympics:
"Chinese Olympic athletes are government employees, raised by and for the state."
Most countries, strictly including the U.S., do not pay and breed their athletes and they are not government employees. To me, it's much more impressive to have these natural athletes that are participating in a sport because they love it than they have no other choice because it's what they've been forced into doing as a means of survival from youth.
But, this is what you get with a Communist regime--we all know how it goes, it's nothing new (ever noticed how the USSR did so well in the past with their own grinding system, which China fully modeled their own after, and yet don't quite do so well anymore after the collapse?). Communism is simply a systematic excuse for a government to abuse its citizens for whatever purpose they deem fit. I just don't find robot athletes competing out of fear and obligation to be very impressive or dignifying of a country. Instead, it makes me pity the people involved when the entire point of the Olympics is being ignored in favor of breeding athletes solely for that purpose. Let it be known that China has over 3,000 "sports schools" whose sole purpose is to churn out athletes and nothing more... and the students begin their "training" at the age of
4. Yes,
four years of age. Ahead of them, they have only a lifetime of being stuck in the system to look forward to.
Yang Wenjun is just another of the forced robot athletes from China, who won a gold medal in canoeing in 2004. As a result, he was given a three-bedroom apartment for winning and enduring all those years of forced sporting... but the story doesn't end there--keep reading. For more perspective, here is what his mother had to say:
His mother, Nie Chunhua, said Yang had been anything but lucky. She wiped away tears with hands dark and swollen from farming. "If I had better economic condition, I would not like him to do sports," Nie, 49, said this spring. "Every time I think about him training, I feel so sad that my heart hurts. For him, and for me, there is so much pain."
You won't see that sort of heartbreaking sentiment from the parents of an athlete doing something because they came to love it on their own. Keep in mind: That's the mother of a
gold medalist talking up there. But, everyone involved knows that it's a torturous life to be an Olympic athlete under the rule of Communist China.
Oh, and before you think that apartment was a gracious gift, read into it a little more:
Yang, one of China’s most successful water sports athletes, has never lived in his apartment. He has not seen his parents in three years. At 24, he lives 250 miles away at his sport’s training center, where he is preparing for the Beijing Olympics.
Yang said he could not stand his life.
For nearly a decade, he has tried to quit canoeing, he told The New York Times during an interview at the training center. He said he would rather attend college or start a business, but acknowledged that he was ill-equipped to do either one.
Chinese athletes have no choice but to give up their entire lives to be groomed to compete. That's what they do. They cannot choose where to live or whether they can even
date on their own terms. Many of them spend at least a decade at the complex, their entire young lives, and have nothing but misery to show for it.
America's "flying fish," as Chinese news media have labeled gold magnet Michael Phelps, is free to decide such basic issues as where he lives and whether he dates. China's own "flying man," hurdler Liu Xiang, must live year-round in a government boarding school complex and delay dating until after the Games.
They can't even
retire as they wish. China is known for its blatant human rights violations toward so many of its citizens that it does so little for (welcome to communism), but when you blackmail people into not being able to retire, what are you really achieving?
Officials refused to let Yang retire, even after he won Olympic gold in the C-2 500-meter race with Meng Guanliang at the Athens Games in 2004. He described how they had threatened to withhold his retirement payment if he did not compete through the Beijing Games. “It is not possible to survive without those benefits,â€
.
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