Beijing Olympic

Friday, July 25, 2008

Birth of an Olympic Superpower
Category: News and Politics


Birth of an Olympic superpower


Exactly 100 years ago a Chinese YMCA lecturer had a dream - that one day China would host the Olympic games. That dream is now about to come true.

Olympic Dreams

China and Sports, 1895-2008



The modern Chinese word for, sport, tiyu, didn't exist until the 1890s and that late 19th-century Chinese attitudes towards the body and physical training "were ambivalent, to say the least . . . Chinese elites generally considered sports undignified - a robust body was not consistent with the idea of the cultured gentleman". But as the Chinese empire crumbled and morale was crucially undermined by the country's defeat in the Sino-Japanese war in 1895, Chinese people became convinced that their nation was a "sick man" whose body needed to be strengthened through a regime of rigorous physical exercise. Sun Yat-sen, China's first president, declared that "If we want to make our country strong, we must first make sure our people have strong bodies."

Nationalists stressed the need for shangwu or "warlike spirit", and Avery Brundage, later president of the International Olympic Committee, wrote in the 1930s that as a result of physical fitness being neglected, "The highly intellectual citizens of China have allowed themselves to be plundered by their own bandits for generations."

China's contact with the emergent Olympic movement was slow and hesitant, and although a national Olympic committee was formed in 1922, China did not participate in an Olympiad until 1932. Its team in Los Angeles consisted of just one man, Liu Changchun, a sprinter, and he was only dispatched at the last minute due to money problems. China took part much more enthusiastically in the notorious 1936 Berlin Olympics, sending 69 athletes, but failed to win a single medal. Xu devotes little attention to these games and says even less about the 1948 London Olympics, at which the penniless Chinese team stayed in a primary school and cooked their own meals.

Mao Zedong, in his first published article, declared that "Physical education . . . should be the number one priority." But the Communist party had little awareness of the Olympics when it came to power in 1949, and it took some time for the new government to realise that one of China's three IOC members had chosen to remain on the mainland rather than flee to Taiwan. At the urging of the Soviet Union, China made a last-minute application to participate in the 1952 games in Helsinki, but its delegation arrived just one day before the closing ceremony. The delay was largely caused by the "two Chinas" dispute that continues to haunt the Olympics to this day.

China first became an Olympic powerhouse at the Los Angeles games in 1984, when it won 15 golds. At the Athens Olympics in 2004 it came second only to the United States.

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