TIME - Man of the Year/CompactPublishing-TimeMagazine-TimeManOfTheYear-Win31MSDOS.iso/moy/072792/07279939.000

Text File | 1993-04-08 | 4.7 KB | 97 lines

                                                                                OLYMPICS, Page 68

1992 SUMMER GAMES

DIVING: China's Chosen Ones


Plucked from home by age eight, trained in state secrecy and
paid bonuses for victories that glorify their land, these
competitors  relive the heyday of Soviet-style sports factories

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III -- With reporting by Mia Turner/Beijing


    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
five and often sent by age eight to compounds where training
methods are state secrets, the expected result is a flotilla of
medals. It had better be: after the Seoul Games in 1988, the
Minister of Sports was sacked from the Cabinet because the teams
won fewer medals than politicians had hoped for.

    China's diving dominance emerged in 1986, when its
performers captured the largest number of medals at the
quadrennial world championships. They were overshadowed,
however, by the sport's premier personality, Greg Louganis of
the U.S., whose career held at peak level for a dozen years,
from a silver medal at the Montreal Olympics in 1976 to two
golds at Seoul. Now that Louganis has retired, the Chinese have
the potential to sweep all four gold medals in Barcelona, for
10-m platform and 3-m springboard diving for men and women, and
add several silvers or bronzes.

    The likeliest medalist among them is the youngest, Fu
Mingxia. Although she did not even know how to swim when she
started diving six years ago, she took gold in the platform at
the Goodwill Games in 1990 and again at last year's world
championships, when she was just 12. She will be shy of 14 when
she attempts the toughest optional dives by any woman at
Barcelona. Her age -- or rather, the small size that goes with
it -- is probably an advantage. A former gymnastics student and
still well proportioned for that sport (5 ft. tall and 93 lbs.),
she is light and quick enough for the multiple midair spins of
a platform champion.

    On the springboard, the front runner is Fu's elder
teammate, Gao Min, 21, who won gold at Seoul and the worlds,
although Fu captured a springboard title in Shanghai in April.
Gao's amazing "air" sense enables her to complete more of her
twists while still ascending.

    Among Chinese men, the platform title figures to go down
to the water between Xiong Ni, 18, who as a 14-year-old almost
beat Louganis in Seoul, and Sun Shuwei, 16, who in his first
year of international competition edged Xiong in both the 1990
Asian Games and the worlds. Nothing if not politically correct,
Sun told the Chinese monthly New Sports, "When I'm served my
favorite noodles, I can eat a lot. But when I'm served Western
food, I'd rather starve than swallow a mouthful. I ate a hot dog
and threw up." On the springboard, Barcelona represents a last
hope for Tan Liangde, 27, second to Louganis at both the Los
Angeles and Seoul Games.

    Chinese officials are quick to deny that undue resources
pour into competitive sports. But in a nation with only 60
swimming pools, there are 10 elite diving schools. Students are
supervised virtually nonstop, cut off from families unless
relatives happen to live nearby, forbidden to date until their
20s and expected to train so hard that most wind up unfit for
work outside athletics. Some are left virtually illiterate in
a land where, by Confucian tradition, intellectual pursuits are
prized over physical ones. In exchange, athletes (and often
their families) enjoy better jobs and housing. They wear
imported athletic clothing. If they make the 20-or-so-member
national team, from age 14 on they earn an average worker's
salary, with bonuses for major victories. An Olympic gold medal
brings 20,000 yuan, or about $3,700, equivalent to the average
per capita income for a quarter-century. Says a prominent
Chinese sports journalist: "Fu Mingxia is a money tree for her
family." Still, that Olympic bonus is less than a fifth of what
the Soviet Union offered athletes for gold at Seoul -- and about
one-third of 1% of what American gymnast Mary Lou Retton earned
from capitalist sources after her Olympic heyday.