How does China manage to dominate gymnastics?
Besieged by the media reporters, He Kexin could barely speak to comment on her fall from the bars. The tiny eighteen years old, barely 4ft 9in had about two dozen Chinese reporters around her, each one of them wanted to know the feelings of the World Gymnastics
participant in Rotterdam.
He, who happens to be the Olympics uneven bars champion at Beijing 2008 along with possessing technically most challenging routine in world, had just finished upon the bars – as did her impressive young teammate Huang Qiushuang.
The pair had observed Beth Tweddle from England seizing their gold medal opportunity and now both of them had to face the media along with the consequences in a featureless room. After them, it was their coach Lu Shanzhen’s turn to be under the spotlight
of Chinese television channels. This was perhaps the first time the team China ended a world Championships without bagging a gold medal since 2002.
As the tears were rolling down from the eyes of young girl and she was trying to have some fresh air beneath a carpet of faces and dicta phones, a Chinese journalist turned back and asked the other “can you imagine what she is going to face back home?”,
the reply was quite expected, the correspondent said that it was hard to imagine as there was a little opportunity to ask or explore while not being back in the country.
As the 4-time Olympics champion Sir Matthew Pinsent had revealed a few years earlier, there were many cases in which after losing to the opponents, the gymnastic coaches had literally beaten their athletes. The case with young Chinese girls did not seem
different at the time.
Just a few days before the World Gymnastics event, a renowned daily newspaper had published a series of photos in which young Chinese gymnasts in brutal states of contortion were depicted. Not only that, even the age of the gymnasts who represent the country
in various events had been subject of great dispute. For instance, taking the example of He, she won her Olympics title when she was merely 14 years old. This was clearly a violation of the rules governing age of the international gymnasts.
Following the news, the world governing body of sports, the FIG, had launched a probe into the accusation but later on announced that it remained satisfied with the paper work provided by the Chinese authorities which kept the situation in control. However,
during the Sydney 2000 event, the county was stripped of its team gymnastics bronze medal amid a gymnast, named Dong Fangxiao was found to be only 14 years old. From then onwards, China has been insisting upon improving the age checking procedures.
The gymnastics training system at China which has been under much criticism has been exporting world champion gymnasts just like it has been producing the mass produced factory items. The questions regarding how does this happen and how the sport represents
the best of Chinese sports and the worst of the others, have been constantly posed by the rest of the world. In the light of failure of China’s women’s team in bagging the gold, the questions would be interesting to be asked all over again.
While responding to somewhat similar questions at the end of the event, the Chinese head coach Lu said that his team did a great job in qualifying, and perhaps that was the reason which made the gymnasts quite nervous about the finals. The man was of the
view that they under estimated some of the rivals, the lapse of judgment hindered them from preparing well, however the lessons were learnt and now they were hopeful to bounce back with greater preparations.
While commenting upon the situation, Trevor Low, the author of several Gymnastics related books and the chair of the British Gymnastics men technical committee said that the way western media gives negative coverage to the Chinese gymnastics matters was
not fair. Low, who has been travelling all around china, was of the view that though the system in place was harder, but it was fair.
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