The Price of Gold

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y incubating a huge pool of tender-aged athletes, China has struck gold particularly in sports like gymnastics, diving and table-tennis that the slender, lithe physique of the average Chinese tends to complement. China's table-tennis team swept all golds at both the Atlanta and Sydney Games—a dominance unmatched by any country in any other sport. But China's sports system has also been successful by deliberately focusing on Olympic events that were underfunded and unappreciated in the West. When China fully rejoined the Olympic movement in 1984, the country discovered that many women's sports were languishing overseas. Already steeped in a socialist mantra that preached equality between the sexes, China invested heavily in women's sports far before Title IX—the U.S. government mandate to end gender discrimination in collegiate sports—began leveling the playing field in America. "In addition to good training, our women can eat bitterness more than women from other countries," boasts Wei Hongquan, a publicity official with the State General Administration of Sport. "That's why we are so strong in women's sports." Case in point: when women's weight lifting became an official Olympic sport in 2000, China captured four out of seven available gold medals, while the Chinese men won only one gold. In Sydney, China's women topped Chairman Mao's famous maxim that "women hold up half the sky" by capturing 60% of the nation's total medals.

China has also entered the winners' circle by building up expertise in little-known sports that offer a profusion of Olympic medals. Shooting, which has 17 golds up for grabs, was targeted early on—and China's first Olympic gold came in the unheralded 50-m pistol event in 1984. In 1995, China noticed that the recently added Olympic sport of Taekwondo attracted few top-class athletes outside South Korea, and cobbled together the nation's first Taekwondo squad. Less than five years later, China won a gold medal in the discipline in Sydney.

For Beijing 2008, the country is concentrating on canoeing/kayaking, with its 48 Olympic medals, and baseball, even though China has never before fielded an Olympic baseball squad and hasn't qualified in the sport for this year's Games. The need to create insta-stars was what brought Xu Damin, a 16-year-old from China's northwestern Xinjiang province, to the Weilun school's Taekwondo program. "I'd never heard of Taekwondo before entering sports school," he says. "But now my whole life is dedicated to this sport." Dripping with sweat, he announces that he, like so many other sports-academy youngsters, dreams of competing in Beijing 2008. Xu may be gifted but his coach, Qian Yongling, remains skeptical about his Olympic potential. "He'll never make it," Qian says later. "It's no use wasting your time talking to him."

Indeed, only a few hundred of China's athletes will ever get to participate in any single Summer Olympics. The cruelty of a system that enlists so many children and brings success to so few has led even the victorious to question the nation's obsession with Olympic glory. Xiao Jian, a lanky 30-year-old with an overgrown buzz cut, came to the Guangdong Sports Technology Institute—one rung higher on the sports hierarchy than Weilun—as a fencer back in 1989. At last year's national games, he was the men's épée champion. But he was left off this year's Olympic roster due to what he says are complex disputes between his home province of Guangdong and Jiangsu, which has the best provincial record in fencing and therefore first pick in forming the roster. So instead of heading to Athens, Xiao is spending this summer futilely training in Guangdong. Having spent more than half his life in the sports system, there is nothing else for him to do. He and his wife, a former fencer herself, have a 10-month-old son. But the last thing either wants for their child is for him to be press-ganged into the system. "Any career has pressures," Xiao says. "But athletes have to start so young, before they really know what they want to do. We lose our childhoods and for what purpose? Most of us never make it, and we're left with not very much at all."

Then, almost apologetically, Xiao stands up and announces he has to go to the institute's cafeteria. Dinner lasts just half an hour—as it has for the past 15 years of his regimented life—so he mustn't be late. After that, Xiao will head to the dormitory and turn in early. Tomorrow, he will have to get up and do it all over again, just like hundreds of thousands of other cogs in China's sports machine.