And Friday the Beijing Olympics Start
I watched a Norwegian tv documentary today about the Chinese training regimes that bring up its young athletes. It centered on a gymnastics school for children and on what became known as “Ma’s army”, a group of runners led by the coach Ma Junren who swept the world in the early- to mid-1990s. The stuff that’s going on is heart-breaking, but unfortunately, there isn’t a whole lot to find about it online.
Going by the documentary, this is pure exploitation: many of the athletes are from poor peasant families, their only shot at making it in life being sport, and then they’re taken from their families — the youngest ones at the gymnastics school were four — and physically and emotionally abused and pushed through a rigid training regime for many years, just so they maybe can have a chance at making it. Their personal lives are taken control of, and if they make it, their profits are, too. At one point, an instructor was talking about how they’d improved: before, the trainers would beat the children too hard. Wtf? When was beating children period ok?
The other part, about Ma and his army of runners, isn’t better. Ma trained some of the world’s best long-distance runners, including Wang Junxia, whose 1993 world record on 10 000m for women still stands. He took control of their personal life — their haircut (short, military-style), their clothes (training clothes), their love life (nonexistent), and their profits. He had them running 30 to 40 km a day; for comparison, a marathon is around 42 km. One clip showed Ma driving a motorcycle after a gang of running girls, his hand on on of the girls’ back, gaining speed, pushing her forward towards the girls she’d fallen back from, faster and faster until she falls facedown on the ground. Apparently, pushing his runners from a motorcycle, a cigar in his mouth, was his modus operandi.
When Wang’s brother died in a traffic accident, Ma kept it from her for two months, “so she could concentrate.” The team eventually broke with him, protesting that he was controlling too much of their personal lives and taking too much of their profits. His regime did produce results, though. When they left him, they didn’t do nearly as well, though if that was because his tactics had made them good or because they had exhausted them is not for me to say. Ma continued coaching after this, without the same success; today he’s no longer a coach, and now runs a kennel.
Maybe the athletes who are put through all of this are better off than they’d been if they didn’t get a chance to get out of the poverty they were born into. But is it worth it? Even if it’s worth it for them, it’s not ok that these practices persist.
