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 ...
What a sick, pathetic communist culture.
Can you say “Pyrrhic Victory?”
Sick monsters to treat children like this.
Yup, that’s what the olympics is about....slaves sacrificing to make the state look good.
Sheesh.
susie
The Beijing Olympics showed us how an evil dictatorship use their own people as machines to achieve a goal including the human abuse of their athletes.
PS: We won more total medal than China, 110 USA versus 100 China. We achieved a better record in Beijing than in Athens or Sydney both in Gold and total medals. At least 20 gold medals won by the Chinese are in very insignificant sports games that we will not compete in to start with.
This what V.I. Lenin, Stalin, Marx intended. Pliable people working for the Party’s goals. No family, personal or religious interferences. There are plenty of people meeting in Denver this week thinking of the wonders a single party can do..
Great call by the IOC. This sure changed a lot in China awarding them the games. I’m sure Jacque Rogge is pating himself on the back.
How the heck did this get published in the LA Times?
That’s real courage...wait until the games are over, and your reporters are safely on a plane outside of Chinese airspace...and then run the report.
Let’s hear it for the MSM.
I actually felt sorry for the Chinese athletes. If they won gold or did poorly, I couldn’t help but wonder how it would affect them and their families. They paid a very high price just so their glorious leaders could gloat.
And the next generation, in addition to having no brothers and sisters, will also have no cousins, no aunts, no uncles, no nephews, and no nieces.
This is because I do not remember stuff like that for very long. There are maybe three or four gold medal winners that I can think of from years past. Mark Spitz in 1972, U.S. hockey Team in 1980, Katrina Navritolova in 1976 and Mary Lou Retton doing that tumbling thing back around 1984. Oh yeah, and who can forget Tonya Harding "stealing" that figure skating medal from that stuck-up woman who married some rich guy and never said very much - Nancy something-or-other.
But that's about it for Olympic memories. All the rest, I have to look up.
And so it will be the same for this year's Olympics. I think I will always remember that swimming dude who got something like 12 gold medals and of course, those scantily clad women playing that beach volleyball thing. Don't remember if they got a gold medal or not but damn, they were pretty good.
So there you go. As far as Chinese athletes, I can't remember the name of a single one. They all pretty much look the same to me and all of them seem to have names that I can't pronounce anyhow.
So anyway, that's the Olympics so far as I'm concerned. Now it's back to watching re-runs of COPS and getting caught up on that Mad Men show that everybody keeps yapping about.
...and no wives, for many of the men, as their one-child policy has led to a 6:5 (or more) ratio of boys to girls (abortion and infanticide...lucky our presidential candidates don’t support that...but then again...)
Anyway, unless they can get a Amsterdam-style flaming gay movement started (which they don’t seem dumb enough to do), there will be a lot of Chinese guys looking elsewhere for love (not good if you’re their neighbors).
The monetary cost was about $100m of Chinese taxpayer funds per gold medal over the last four years. That’s on top of the $60b spent on sports-related infrastructure for the Olympics. I don’t begrudge them their medals. If China’s rulers are this desperate to bask in reflected glory, who am I to object? Let them build more expensive (and useless) monuments to their vanity.
Excellent summation of the u-limpics.
If this happened in the USA, people would be in jail for child abuse. The IOC has no business giving out medals to these abusers. And shame on NBC for talking about how "wonderful" they are. They are young people abused by the state.
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