Earlier this month I mentioned an inflammatory quote from the British Olympic Association (BOA) boss, who said that the world was “at war against China” when it came to athletic competition. Now the BOA has some numbers to go along with that statement. In a report released last week the group that said if the Summer Olympics had been held last year, China would have topped the medal count. (Here’s an AP story, and a press release with links to the report.) That’s a jump from 2005, when according to finishes in top-level international competitions, the U.S. would have led an Olympic medal haul, and China would have finished third behind Russia.
Much of China’s gains came from sports where the mainland doesn’t have a long tradition of achievement, like fencing, rowing and tennis. That’s part of the country’s overall medal strategy, which my colleague Hannah Beech wrote a fascinating story about ahead of the 2004 Summer Games. When you consider that China only resumed participating in the Games in 1984 after decades of protest over Taiwan’s inclusion, its Olympic gains are climbing faster even than its economy.
In my last post on this I expressed the hope, naive it now seems, that we wouldn’t be subjected to another year plus of ugly sporting nationalism. There seemed to be some tinges of that in the brawl between China’s Olympic soccer team and Queens Park Rangers in London earlier this month. The fight brought to mind George Orwell’s line about serious sport being “war minus the shooting,” from an essay inspired by a 1945 tour of the U.K. by Moscow Dynamo. I guess that’s better than war with the shooting, but it makes me worry there will be some toxic byproducts from the China vs. the world/the world vs. China sentiment that’s brewing ahead of Beijing ’08.