Posted on 08/25/2008 8:01:48 PM PDT by george76
Athletes sacrificed dearly -- one was separated from her toddler, one was banned from eating dinner, one missed a parent's funeral. While Americans spoke of fun, the Chinese were on a 'sacred mission.'
If anybody feels a pang of jealousy over China's haul of Olympic gold medals, they need only pause to consider what the athletes went through to get them.
The only mother on China's team, Xian Dongmei, told reporters after she won her gold medal in judo that she had not seen her 18-month-old daughter in one year, monitoring the girl's growth only by webcam. Another gold medalist, weightlifter Cao Lei, was kept in such seclusion training for the Olympics that she wasn't told her mother was dying. She found out only after she had missed the funeral.
Chen Ruolin, a 15-year-old diver, was ordered to skip dinner for one year to keep her body sharp as a razor slicing into the water. The girl weighs 66 pounds.
"To achieve Olympic glory for the motherland is the sacred mission assigned by the Communist Party central," is how Chinese Sports Minister Liu Peng put it at the beginning of the Games.
The contrast couldn't be greater than between the Chinese and U.S. athletes. In their post-match interviews, the Americans rambled on about their parents, their siblings, their pets, their hobbies. They repeatedly used the word fun.
The Chinese athletes generally don't have pets, hobbies, brothers or sisters (since most are products of China's one-child policy).
(Excerpt) Read more at latimes.com ...
They're not slaves. If they get *any* medals, they will end up multi-millionaires (in dollars) via government rewards and endorsement deals. It's a good deal for the athletes who make it and are willing to make the personal sacrifices - not such a wonderful one for the Chinese taxpayer, who has to foot the bill for tens of thousands of salaries for has-beens and never-wuzzers.
Americans get track and field athletes who work full-time stateside and train part-time, and still beat the Chinese team without any cost to the American taxpayer. The Chinese losers are paid nice salaries to train all the time. Slaves they are not. The correct term - whether they win or lose - is leeches. Based on Chinese government spending on its sports machine over the past four years (including government-paid trainers and athletes), the Olympics cost Chinese taxpayers $100m per gold medal.
The girl weighs 66 pounds
Lots of little emperors.
That says it all, I think. Anywhere that objectivity mattered, we won. Wherever the results depended on human (lack of) judgement, the host country won. I’ve been wondering for sometime whether the Chinese Govt might have pressured the judging cohort in some way. This only strengthens that idea.
The score looks even more lopsided if you eliminate the obscure events that we didn’t even bother to enter athletes for (and neither did most other major countries); those sports were basically “gimmes” for the well-supported Chinese; it’s easy to win when your next closest challenger comes from a tiny banana republic and has next to no training facilities. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that China entered athletes in those events solely because they knew they could inflate their medal total that way.
Communists cheat all the time. Sometimes others and sometimes themselves.
“How the heck did this get published in the LA Times?”
Good question. This is the first objective and well reported article I have read in the LA Times in years. The writer likely will be fired in the morning.
And they have the nerve to say we torture people?
Now with baseball and softball eliminated from Olympics in 2012, I won’t even find it worth watching the games. IOC is anti-American and biased so why should I give them my support?
Everybody’s watching what’s going on in Beijing right now with the Olympics. Think about the amount of money that China has spent on infrastructure. Their ports, their train systems, their airports are vastly the superior to us now, which means if you are a corporation deciding where to do business you’re starting to think, “Beijing looks like a pretty good option.”
I was talking to my fiance about this. If China thinks there record haul of gold medals is going to impress many people, they miscalculated again.
If anything, most Japanese probably feel pity for the Chinese medal winners because four years from now, they are going to be completely forgotten there will be another shipment of medal seekers out of the sport concentration camps.
Suits me, Mao. That leaves them less to spend on trying to take us out.
And for the girls, there are plenty of non-Chinese suitors that they can go for.
She needs some of those North Korean super noodles.
The irony is that the US is considered "individualist", while China is "collectivist". Yet who did better at the team sports? The US, while China cleaned up in the individual events (Team gymnastics doesn't count).
Meanwhile the US has Gold Medal winners who make $100 Million, like Kobe Bryant.
No kidding. I’d post a pic of the one I found (not an olympian, but still beautiful), but I wouldn’t want to dazzle y’all.
Hate those bastards!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=klj12Z_ARow
Here some more evidence of child abuse by the vaunted Chinese sports training program.
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