Word: medals
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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...
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...
...Chinese government wants is a doping scandal on home soil. About $20 billion is being spent on Olympics-related preparations. But even though seven years of Olympics priming has only heightened Chinese hopes for domination, sports officials in recent weeks have scaled back expectations of a record gold-medal harvest. In March, the deputy head of the Sports Ministry cautioned that China didn't expect to surpass the U.S. The modesty may have been tactical. For Athens, Chinese sports officials put their target at just 20 gold medals. In fact, China won 32. Nearly 60% of China's total medal...
Morgan Stanley security chief Rick Rescorla may very well be the greatest American hero no one has ever heard of. Rescorla's many friends--from his Army days on--have been advocating a Presidential Medal of Freedom for him. But that has gone nowhere, because to celebrate his achievements and sacrifices on 9/11 calls attention to those--at the Port Authority and elsewhere--who got it all wrong. Steven R. Hansen, JONESBORO, ARIZ...