Diving China's Chosen Ones

The use of Olympic athletes as instruments of state propaganda is widely in disrepute. Most of the totalitarian sports factories are being dismantled amid public disgust at the huge sums spent on facilities, the privileges and cash bestowed on winners, the epidemic abuse of steroids and other drugs and the emotional wreckage bred by taking children from parents at a tender age, training them obsessively for one task and tossing them aside when their competitive days are over. But in one nation, especially in one sport, the old ways are unrepentantly deployed. For China's divers, who are recruited starting at age...