Word: golds
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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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...
China's table-tennis success inspired the country's sports officials to apply the same model to medal-rich Olympic disciplines. In addition to diving, in which the Chinese won six of an available eight gold medals in Athens, the country is now a powerhouse in weight-lifting and shooting, neither of which was a popular event before the sports bureaucrats got involved. China's first Taekwondo national team was formed in 1995, when officials noticed that few athletes outside of South Korea competed in the martial art. Five years later, in Sydney, China won an Olympic gold...
...sports--just compare the NBA with the WNBA--the Chinese state lavishes funds on its female athletes from childhood onward. Mao used to say, "Women hold up half the sky." In fact, four years ago in Athens, Chinese women did even better, winning 60% of the country's gold medals...