Slumped, despondent and alone on the sidelines of the men’s gymnastics final after two falls during his bar routine handed Japan an Olympic gold medal, China’s Su Weide cut a forlorn figure.
“Today taught me a big lesson. It’s a big regret,” the crestfallen 24-year-old Olympic debutant said at a later press conference. He was taking the blame for the bitter loss on his own shoulders and apologising to his teammates for letting them down.
The hashtag ‘Su Weide’s apology’ became a top trend on Chinese social media platform Weibo where there was both sympathy and an outpouring of anger against the silver medal winner, and his coach.
“Do you think Su Weide even looks like a gymnast? Look at his arms?… we don’t understand how an athlete of this calibre gets to be on the national team,” spewed one blogger.
Another accused his coach of picking a gymnast “who frequently made mistakes.”
While every nation seeks Olympic glory, the stakes are higher for the 405 athletes from China, where sporting victory has historically been co-opted by the ruling Communist Party to mark the success of its authoritarian rule and to amplify the country’s global image as a rising superpower.
Gold medals were typically seen as the only desirable outcome, Chinese sports commentator Shi Mingjin told Radio Free Asia during the first week.
“China views Olympic medals as reflecting on the glory of the entire country, so they have pretty strong feelings about this,” he said. “If you win a silver medal for France, nobody will say you let the side down – it’s not the same kind of atmosphere.”
China’s first gold in Paris, in the 10m air rifle mixed team final, generated a hashtag viewed 230 million times on Chinese social media on July 26, reported the ‘What’s on Weibo’ website. State media chose to honour Xu Haifeng, the first ever professional shooter to win the top medal.
Although China has participated in the Olympics since 1932, it took nearly 50 years to achieve gold with Xu’s victory at the 1984 Los Angeles Games.
Ranking highly on the medals board had since become a “national mission,” said Dr Shushu Chen, an Associate Professor in Sport Policy and Management at the University of Birmingham.
Since 1984, China has become a sports giant, shooting up the tables to become first in the gold medal count during the Beijing Summer Olympics in 2008 and regularly appearing in the top three strongest nations.
“Domestically, sports serve as a medium for conveying the national spirit, enhancing national pride and promoting life values,” Dr Chen told the Telegraph.
“If you are looking outwards, it is considered that hosting a successful sporting event can boost diplomacy and showcase China’s international prestige and performance at the Olympics. The medal count especially is seen by China as a reflection of its overall economic strength as a nation,” she added.
“Being successful at the Games has been seen as bringing glory to the nation, defending national honour and prestige, demonstrating this indomitable Chinese spirit,” she said.
This could be viewed as either adding more pressure to athletes or motivating them to strive for success, Dr Chen said, arguing that state media recently was shifting its emphasis away from gold medals as the ultimate national priority.
But Olympic tensions are also stoked by geopolitical rivalries that have overshadowed the Games since epic US-Soviet showdowns were eulogised in Hollywood movies like ‘Miracle on Ice’; the tale of America’s surprise victory over the Soviet ice hockey favourites in Lake Placid, 1980.
Competition between the US and China has since taken over as the dominant geopolitical contest of the Games, as outside of the sporting arena the world’s two largest economies engage in a bitter trade war and spar for military and diplomatic superiority on the global stage.
China was continuing the tradition of major powers viewing sports as another facet of geostrategic competition, said Justin Bassi, executive director of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute in Canberra.
“We saw that in the Cold War. Apart from the space race and the arms race, the competition at the sports level between the US and the Soviet Union was exceptionally strong,” he said.
“China sees it the same way. They want to be militarily dominant; they want to be technologically dominant; they want to take over the US mantle as the world superpower in these areas and they see sport in this same way,” he added.
“If their sportsmen and women can defeat, in particular, the Americans and both individually and as a nation win more golds at the Olympics, then they are able to project that the Communist Party’s regime and rules are superior to democratic values and the democratic way of life.”
Bonnie Glaser, a China expert and managing director of the Indo-Pacific programme at the German Marshall Fund, agreed that for China, “the Olympics is a platform for great power competition.
“There is no doubt that Beijing wants to demonstrate its athletic prowess, especially relative to the US,” she said.
“It’s telling that a US swimmer, Katie Ledecky, was appropriately proud of her achievement of coming in third and winning a bronze medal, while a Chinese swimmer who won bronze was in tears, no doubt because she was bested by two Americans.”
When American sports superstar Ledecky won bronze in the 400m women’s freestyle – the first bronze of her celebrated Olympic career – she said she was “grateful” for a medal in “such a good field.”
Her smiles and cheerful demeanour contrast sharply with Chinese champion, Zhang Yufei, who wept after coming third to her American rivals in the women’s 100m butterfly.
“Perhaps I’ve pushed myself too hard,” Zhang, dubbed China’s ‘butterfly queen’, said. “I did feel a lot of pressure.”
Many on Chinese social media urged her not to cry. Others lashed out over the perception that Chinese swimmers have been subjected to an excessive number of drug tests and whether this has disrupted their performance.
No Olympic discipline has been more reflective of the charged political rivalries between China and the US and its allies than swimming and a long-running controversy over doping allegations against Chinese athletes.
The doping storm has overshadowed international swim races since the World Anti-Doping Agency (Wada) confirmed reports in April that 23 Chinese swimmers tested positive for trimetazidine – a medication that increases blood flow to the heart – before the Tokyo Olympics in 2021.
Wada accepted the Chinese anti-doping agency’s (Chinada) findings that the positive test was due to substance contamination and a World Aquatics audit concluded there was no mismanagement while an independent probe ruled there had been no favouritism.
But the handling of the issue has rattled top performing swimmers, who questioned the overall transparency of the anti-doping system ahead of the Games.
Caeleb Dressel, the American seven-time Olympic gold medallist, asserted he had no confidence in the case involving 23 athletes, while Australian breaststroke champion Zac Stubblety-Cook criticised a “failed system.” British star Adam Peaty went as far as to say, “there’s no point winning if you’re not winning fair.”
China’s swimmers have hit back with their own barbs. World-record holder Qin Haiyang accused doping testers of being part of a “European and American plot to unsettle China’s team” by subjecting them to a more rigorous testing regime.
The controversy has moved beyond a war of words to threats from US politicians to cut future funding to Wada unless sweeping reforms are made.
Wada last week said it was considering legal action against the US Anti-Doping Agency (Usada) over “defamatory” accusations of a cover-up.
In a statement, the global body said it had been “unfairly caught in the middle of geopolitical tensions between superpowers” that it had no mandate to participate in.
The charged controversy had erupted into heated discussions on Chinese social media about the unfair treatment of China’s team and American influence over the world anti-doping body, said Dr Xiaoning Lu, a reader in modern Chinese culture and language at SOAS.
Many felt that “in the larger context of US-China competition rivalry, that the US has excessive power on the international stage, in every aspect,” she said. Some were even angrily calling for China to withdraw from the Games.
But the drama of the swimming row has not blunted the Olympics’ apparent value as a channel for pushing Chinese state propaganda about the country’s outstanding leadership and rapid rejuvenation and modernisation.
Success at such a high-profile global event could be a helpful distraction from public angst over domestic economic woes, high youth unemployment and a raging property crisis, experts suggest.
On the eve of the Paris Games, the Global Times, known as a Chinese state mouthpiece, stressed President Xi Jinping’s personal stake in past and present Olympic successes.
His leadership, they said, had not only “elevated China’s status” and promoted the “Olympic spirit worldwide” but had been key to the country “hosting a spectacular, extraordinary and remarkable Winter Olympics” in 2022.
Authoritarian regimes always put a lot of stake in events like the Olympics, said Charles Parton, an associate fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, who spent much of his diplomatic life working on and in China. “It is useful for propaganda; it shows that the country is doing well.”
But Dr Lu offered an alternative view of attitudes within the nation of 1.4 billion that was now confident in its economic rise and influential status in the world.
“We used to care a lot about the number of gold medals as an indicator of national strength in the past but this year I think we are much more relaxed about it,” she said.
“The shift really happened after the 2008 Beijing Olympics. That was the peak when people really cared about the need to do well on the global stage.
“After that the whole nation became so much more confident because of economic growth. China overall became more powerful.”
Dr Chen said the 2008 Games had been “all about China’s great revival, taking a step forward to national rejuvenation, peaceful rising.”
She added: “The notion of a sports power is the image that China wanted to project internationally because being a sports powerhouse is a representation of being a major world power.”
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