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Today Chen Yun (yun means cloud) trains at the Weifang City Sports School, one of 3,000 state-run athletics academies that consign nearly 400,000 youngsters to a form of athletic servitude. Sitting under the watchful eyes of her coach and a man who identifies himself as the school's "propaganda director," Cloud tells me that weight-lifting is her favorite sport. Any hobbies? I ask. "Weight-lifting," she answers. Anything Cloud likes besides weight-lifting? "Weight-lifting," she repeats. I try again. Cloud glances at the two men near her. Behind them is a poster of Chairman...
...Sport is hardly the only arena in which China aims to be faster, higher and stronger. A little more than three decades ago, the People's Republic was an isolated, agrarian nation whose closest international ally was Albania. Today China is making new partners around the world as it vies with the U.S. and Europe in the race to gobble up markets and natural resources. Its trade with Africa and Latin America has increased sixfold since 2001. It is the world's top consumer of cement, grain, meat, coal, copper and steel. Back at home, China has transformed itself into...
...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...
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...
After I went through two years of not winning an event, what kept me going was winning one more major. Once I won that last U.S. Open, I spent the next six months trying to figure out what was next. Slowly my passion for the sport just vanished. I had nothing left to prove...