Arindam Chaudhuri
In India the opportunity to organise the Commonwealth Games was turned into an opportunity to loot public funds and plunder the treasury. China, on the other hand, used the opportunity to organise the Olympic Games to showcase its pre-eminence in the world of sports and promote its national interest on the global scene.
The saga of shame of the 2010 Commonwealth Games in Delhi continues as more and more shameful skeletons tumble out of the cupboard. And it only makes my heart cringe. More so because I believe that sports is literally one of the key routes to a healthy nation. From child health to adult health — both physical and mental — sports has a great role to play, especially in this day and age when children are getting addicted to videogames and the Internet.
To me, personally, the Commonwealth Games event — good or bad — was in reality a great opportunity for India to develop the Indian sports scene. Instead, we found it a great opportunity to plunder more and more money. And that’s what forces me to take a look at how the Chinese used the Olympics as a great leap forward and how they have over years made sports a way of life.
Compared to the Indian games, the 2008 Beijing Olympics actually spoke volumes about China’s commitment to sports. Not only did China refurbish the entire host city to welcome the game and honour the sport at large, but it also set a new record in its medals’ tally. But what was most noteworthy was the leap that China has taken in sports over the years.
This unprecedented transition in Chinese sports gets largely visible when one compares the first ever entry of the Chinese to Olympics, vis-à-vis the way they stole the show at the 2008 Olympics. In 1932, during the Los Angeles Olympics, the Chinese representation was just a lone athlete who represented 450 million Chinese and came back home empty handed. Their tryst with the first gold medal happened 52 years later, again in the same venue; and from there on, there was no turning back.
And finally, in 2008, a nation which was considered an underdog in many events previously, shocked the world by topping the medals’ tally with 51 gold medals (a jump from 32 gold medals in 2004 Athens Olympics and 28 gold medals in 2000 Sydney Olympics); they were followed by the US which had just 36 gold medals. But then, this jump in the medal tally didn’t happen overnight.
China started preparing its athletes for this event even before they started their infrastructural development (unlike our preparation, where during the CWG, neither was the infrastructure ready, nor did the sportsmen have space and facilities for training). As soon as the nation won the bid for hosting the 2008 Olympics, the Government announced its most ambitious sports plan called “Winning pride at the Olympics”, which defined the number of gold medals China could possibly win in different events — after analysing the strengths and weaknesses of their athletes.
The Government laid down clear cut policies and strategies to target sports and the number of gold medals that China needed to win in every sports event. The country also launched Project 119 and Plan for Olympics Glory — something that is very unique and equally strategic. The project defined how China could win 119 gold medals (a figure that was later increased to 122) based on their performance in the 2000 Olympics (as the bid for 2008 was won by China in 2001).
The flow of funds was never a constraint. During the Olympics, the sports budget was increased to $700 million (an increase by $300 million) along with building specialised sports infrastructure at the Qingdao City costing $30 million. Interestingly, all women sports events received huge funding and got special attention. This is rare even in the West. No wonder, China won 46 gold medals in the ladies’ events (including team and doubles) in the 2008 Olympics.
For China, the Beijing Olympics was much more than a mere sporting event. It was China’s attempt to showcase their magnanimity to the world. The architectural marvel ‘Bird’s Nest stadium’ was a stepping stone towards the same. The iconic Bird’s Nest, even months after the event, draws hundreds of local tourists to stay back and get a feel of China’s preeminence in the world of sports.
In fact, the Chinese Government had a tough time convincing the IOC about their bid, as the IOC was quite sceptical on account of China’s human rights issues and resulting global protests against its political backdrop and governance ideology. So once China got the opportunity, they left no stone unturned. The sporting infrastructure was just one part to showcase the Chinese dominance — the final nail on the coffin was their ultimate medals’ tally, which literally shut every critic. Not only did they top the medals’ tally, but their athletes also broke several world records.
In fact, what made the Chinese achieve the unachievable is not just the result of targeted hard work but more on account of the basic orientation that every Chinese gets from the age of four. The Chinese Government has pumped in enormous amounts of money into sports clubs and schools that are engineered to train kids in various kinds of sports. In Li Xiaoshuang Gymnastics School, for example, hundreds of students (between the ages of four to 10) are coached by seasoned trainers. This school boasts of producing several Olympic gold medalists as well. The staff here is recruited by the Government’s General Administration of Sports and plays a pivotal role in choosing and identifying future stars. The system of selecting world-class sportsmen is very logically structured and is bereft of any nepotism and politics. Schools and sports training centers across China train millions of kids in different forms of sports from where stars are selected for professional provincial teams; and the best of all graduate to the national teams.
These students undergo the most challenging (read brutal) conditions while training and that is probably the reason that they excel in most sports. Moreover, unlike in our country — where sportsmen are found selling medals and certificates for survival — the future of all these sportsmen is secured by including their names in the Government’s payroll. All sportsmen are on Government salaries. As a matter of fact, the lifestyle of sportsmen in China is even better than that of their Western counterparts who mainly rely on scholarships and jobs for getting trained.
In China, the story is completely different. The cost of training is borne by the Government itself. The sport training institutes also take care of the psychological well-being of the Chinese sportsmen — something that is missing in most of the nations or comes at an additional cost. Going by estimates calculated by the director of the Institute of Physical Science, the Chinese Government spends a staggering $7 million behind one single Olympics gold medal. This is evident from the fact that the government had kept all their resources and plans concentrated on preparing sportsmen for the Beijing Olympics prior to the Beijing Olympics games.
The writer is a management guru and Editor, The Sunday Indian.
Courtesy : Pioneer
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