Word: nationalism
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China is hardly the only country to build a national sports machine. In fact, the nation's athletics factories were modeled after the old Soviet-style system, which during the cold war churned out limber Romanian gymnasts and a fleet of doped-up East German swimmers. But the East bloc is long gone--and with it, sports by diktat. Today China is one of the few nations, apart from the likes of North Korea and Cuba, to commit so many state resources to athletics. While some young Chinese choose to attend sports schools, others, like Cloud, are little more than...
...million, from $428 million the year before. "With the 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...
China's athletics achievement is all the more impressive given that it isn't a very sporty nation. I remember jogging in Beijing several years ago only to have people look behind me to see whom I was running away from. But China's leaders have a long tradition of using sports as a spur to national pride. Consider the country's decades-long dominance of table tennis. This supremacy had little to do with a national passion for wooden paddles and plastic balls. China decided to develop star paddlers largely because the International Table Tennis Federation...
Shortly after SmartBikes are introduced in the nation's capital, bike-sharing will be showcased at the Republican and Democratic national conventions, which are being held in Minneapolis and Denver, respectively. Each city will have 1,000 communal bikes on hand for its convention, thanks to a corporate sponsor and a cycling-advocacy group. To outsiders, cold-wintered Minneapolis may seem like an unlikely bike haven. But even when it's below freezing, hardy Minnesotans commute via bike. Last year the U.S. Census Bureau ranked Minneapolis the city with the second highest number of bike commuters as a percentage...
...nation of dietary extremes: even as a third of American teens are overweight, more than a million others suffer from undereating disorders. But sandwiched between those who eat far too much and those who voluntarily eat too little are millions of American teens in the moderate middle. Because their eating habits are varied and so difficult to study, it's easy to lose track of what's on their menus--but it's worth trying to find out. In a few years, those teens will be making food decisions not just for themselves but also for their own kids...