Word: weight
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...life to lifting disks of iron above her head. Then a stranger came to her remote village in eastern China's Shandong province, took detailed measurements of her shoulder width, thigh length and waist circumference--and announced she would have the honor of serving her 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...
...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 Mao Zedong, the founder of the People's Republic...
...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 in the West, received a cash infusion. Around...
...their country proud. For many parents, securing three bowls of rice a day for their offspring was enough to convince them that the grueling training was worth it. But by the '90s, with the economy opening up, fewer families were willing, say, to send their daughters to train as weight lifters when they could study computer science instead. After all, for every Olympic champion the sports academies produce, hundreds of thousands of other children fail. Most of these kids miss out on the education provided in regular schools. The China Sports Daily estimates that about 80% of the country...
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...