Monastic training!

Not at all triathlon-related, but Evan Osnos has an interesting piece in this week's New Yorker about Chinese Olympic boxing gold hopeful Zou Shiming. Some paragraphs from the middle on the preparations in Beijing and the culture of athletics in China:

Today, as China transforms itself for the Olympics, Beijing is determined to broadcast a picture of prosperity. It is overhauling parts of the city that hadn’t changed much since the thirteenth century, razing miles of one-story brick alleys that Mongol conquerors designed to uniform widths of twelve or twenty-four paces. It is building a new world of vertical apartment complexes, with foreign names like the Greenwich and the Upper East Side. Underground, a web of subway lines has more than doubled in length in barely six years. Olympic guests will step through an airport terminal that will be the largest in the world. The torch relay will include 21,888 runners, more than any previous Olympics, and a stop at the peak of Mt. Everest. In this atmosphere, any feat of preparation seems plausible. One Chinese pork supplier vowed to produce specially pampered pigs, to insure that hormone-fed meat would not cause athletes to fail doping tests. Only after Chinese citizens began wondering about their own pork did a Beijing Olympic Committee spokesperson issue a “Clarification on Olympic Pig-Related Reports,” denouncing the pork story as an “exaggerated falsehood.”

In the Games proper, China hopes to win more gold than ever before. At the founding of the People’s Republic, in 1949, no Chinese athlete had ever stood on an Olympic podium; by the close of the 2004 Summer Games, in Athens, China trailed only the United States, thirty-two to thirty-six, in that year’s gold medals. Chinese sports officials scrutinize, dissect, and forecast the medal race with an intensity that lends it the air of science—convinced that sufficient analysis will eventually engineer away the frailty of a diver in midair or a fighter in the ring. In 2000, Chinese officials launched the 119 Project, a campaign to win more gold medals in the Summer Games’ most competitive events—a list that by China’s calculation totalled a hundred and nineteen medals.

In Athens, China’s gold reflected its focus on producing an élite cadre of championship-level performers. Most Olympic delegations return home with more bronzes and silvers than golds. China achieved the opposite: for the most part, its athletes went to the top or they went nowhere. China now cultivates sports that it never cared about before, events that (like boxing) increase a medal count because they include various weight classes or categories. Sports officials groom champions in canoe-kayak and doubles tennis. Chinese athletes and coaches have also begun to defy their long-held belief that they can never best larger, taller Western competitors. And doing so is particularly glorious, as the sprinter Liu Xiang indicated after he won a gold medal in the hundred-and-ten-metre hurdles in Athens. “I believe I achieved a modest miracle for the yellow-skinned Chinese people and the Asian people,” he said afterward.

The élite athletes who bear the responsibility for realizing the country’s ambitions live in privileged isolation. Their talents are treated as public goods, but while they are practicing they live in secluded sports complexes, where they eat, sleep, and train under coaches’ instructions. If national-team members have endorsements, they are required to share the money with their team staff and the state. When the Olympic diving champion Guo Jingjing was criticized, two years ago, for having too many “commercial activities,” she appeared on state television to apologize. “I belong to the country,” she said. As a boxer, Zou is even more cloistered, because his sport sanctifies monastic training. At times, coaches confiscate his cell phones to eliminate distractions.