Chinese pride skating on thin ice at Winter Olympics
- Source: Global Times
- [23:17 February 23 2010]
- Comments
Illustration: Liu Rui
By Shi Jingtao
Zhou Yang's victory on Sunday in women's 1,500-meter short-track speed skating marked a new gold medal record for China at the Winter Olympics.
China's success has been applauded by a population eager to see China's steady progress in sports. Following China's amazing success in placing first in gold medals at the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing, it seems that a great Winter Olympics power is rising.
But the hard fact is that current breakthroughs and new records are still far from enough to support any case for China as a great sporting power. Our current achievements are only remarkable compared to our past weaknesses. When it comes to the Winter Olympics, Chinese teams are pygmys among giants.
For example, China ranks 19th in ice dancing and 37th in women's 15-kilometer cross-country skiing. In some games, China is not even qualified as a participant, like men's ice hockey and alpine skiing, and can only act as spectators. Some sports, like bobsled have no Chinese team at all.
So, it is still far too early for China to claim to be a strong Winter Olympics power. Praising ourselves for these successes is just narrow-minded smugness.
Most importantly, there's no match between Chinese culture and gold medal breakthroughs, in contrast with the 2008 Olympics in Beijing. There the combination of national pride, Chinese culture, and sporting achievement brought out the best in each other. It was also a splendid platform for the display of Chinese culture and power.
This is not the case in the Winter Olympics. For instance, Huang Xintong and Zheng Xun, the only Asian competitors in ice dancing, originally intended to arrange their choreography in the Chinese style. However, as they said, "China has so many ethnic groups that referees do not even have a chance to understand. If we did use the Chinese style, they would not know the meaning of our ice dancing."
They deeply felt that cultural differences cannot be bridged in one or two days. Huang Xintong said, "In fact, it is just like a foreigner who sings Peking Opera or practices martial arts, who will always be mocked by Chinese people whether he does it well or not."
Without Chinese culture becoming more widespread internationally, Chinese aesthetics might not be appreciated by Olympic referees and spectators. Of course, aesthetic judgements make up an extremely small part of Winter Olympics events, and most require performance to a set technical standard which has nothing or little to do with culture, so this is hardly a plausible excuse for Chinese lack of success.
The simple fact is that Winter Olympic events have never played a major part in China. Within the Chinese sporting establishment, the kind of obsessive attention and deliberate medal-targeting that produced results in 2008 haven't yet been directed at these events.
For China to becoming a sporting powerhouse on ice, more national attention needs to be paid to Winter Olympics events.
Though it was all over the TV during the Spring Festival period this year, according to an online survey, about 60 percent of Chinese netizens did not even know the event was taking place. The high thresholds for participation in many winter sports, which require special conditions and expensive equipment, acts as a barrier for widespread participation in these games in China.
Despite the frequent good news from the 2010 Winter Olympics, there's still a long way to trudge before any dreams of being a great Winter Olympics power can come true.
The author is a Shandong-based freelance writer. forum@globaltimes. com.cn
