Continuing from Part 7, one last stop on the historical and world-tour of sports dominance before I can spend another 80 weeks talking about the US (ok, maybe only 2 more weeks).  And that stop is in Communist china.  Because, as you’ll see when I quote some statistics below, the Chinese showed some outright ass-kicking dominance in Beijing in 2008, at least in the handful of sports that they targeted.  But I’m getting a bit ahead of myself.

In many ways, China represents, in a sense, the logical end result/culmination of everything that had gone before in both the earlier Communist and Socialist sports machines.  Basically, they seem to have taken a bit of the best from each of the systems and integrated them into an optimized whole.  Hopefully this will make more sense in a second and, frankly, I await a flood of Chinese sport secrets to flood the market any day now.

Location and Sociopolitical Rhetoric

Although Communist China is absolutely massive in terms of population, it is a single country.  In a sense this is sort of a melding of the sheer numbers that the Soviets had access to (because of the landmass that the USSR covered) with the single country nature of the GDR.

Like I said above, in a lot of ways the system that they have developed is the logical end result of what both systems did and how they did it.  To put this in perspective, a quick Google search puts the current population in China at 1.3 billion.  That’s a lot of folks and a lot of potential kids to make into athletes.

I honestly don’t have anything different so say about the sociopolitical climate in China that I didn’t already say when I talked about the former Soviet sports machine or the GDR.  It’s a communist country with everything that entails.  Kids are raised to do what they’re told and forego individual desires for the overall benefit of the country.   And judging from some of the stuff that has come out, they don’t appear to share the ‘love of their children’ that Glenn Pendlay made such a point of regarding the Soviets.

Continue reading Why the US Sucks at Olympic Lifting: Part 8