Word: goldings
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...motherland as a weight lifter. The then 14-year-old daughter of vegetable farmers had little choice in the matter. She had been chosen to be a cog in China's vast sports machine, a multibillion-dollar apparatus designed with one primary goal in mind: churning out Olympic gold medalists...
Pride is a difficult concept to quantify, but for China, the Olympics provide a simple calculation for its ascent. Two decades ago in Seoul, China won just five golds. By 2004 in Athens, the country's 32-medal gold rush was second only to that of the U.S. Now China is hoping its home-turf advantage in Beijing will vault it into first place. If the People's Republic succeeds, the controversies over protests in Tibet, arms for Darfur, Steven Spielberg's pulling out as adviser to the Games--all that loss of face to date will have been worth...
Take sports. After Beijing won the right seven years ago to host the 2008 Olympics, the country's State General Administration of Sports unveiled a Cabinet-approved policy called "Winning pride at the Olympics." The program built on China's long-standing "Gold-medal strategy" of targeting sports that offer the most Olympic golds because of different weight classes or race lengths. (Fencing, for instance, holds 10 golds, while canoeing/kayaking has 16.) It didn't matter that most Chinese knew nothing of these sports. The point was to accumulate gold medals. Women's sports, which tend to receive less funding...
...Cost of Gold...
...Olympics in Beijing, we want to make sure we do very well," says Hao Qiang, head of the Sports Ministry's competition-and-training department. "Otherwise, the public will be very disappointed that we did not display proper national spirit." It's a pricey endeavor: each of China's gold medals will cost the state upwards of $7 million, according to Bao Mingxiao, director of the Sports Ministry's Institute of Physical Science. At the Qingdao City Sports School, one of the country's top breeding grounds of Olympic athletes, principal Qiao Xiangdong credits Beijing 2008 for spurring the local...