ONE OF the most significant hours of these Olympics came on Friday night, when Liu Xiang equalled the world record for the men’s 110m hurdles, and then Huina Xing outran the best Africans in the women’s 10,000m.
Two gold medals for China in the cradle of Olympian sport beefed up the Asian giant’s tally towards the 30 gold-medal mark and silenced the growing chorus of those who sniffed and said they are just collecting gongs in minor sports.
Liu, in reasonable English, told them: “That was a world record? That’s very good.” He was barely breathing heavily. His technique was cleaner than the rest, his speed too great for the so-called advanced sporting nations’ hurdlers. Pretty soon, he will hold the record on his own.
“Today,” he said, “the Chinese people showed the world they can run as fast as anybody else. I hope the result will change people’s minds that a nation or member of the Asian race is lagging behind the Europeans or Americans.”
At a press conference, the deputy chairman of their delegation, Xiao Tian, gave a 40-minute address, solemnly read from a script, without translation, to a room of predominantly young Chinese.
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They faithfully recorded his oratory, with barely a murmur. The address appeared to be a summons to report back to the nation how well things were going in this rehearsal for Beijing 2008.
China brought a team of young competitors and was ahead of its projected medal count by almost 10 golds. Xiao was mostly very satisfied with his athletes, “with some exceptions”. China has 17,000 athletes in elite training. It has 1.3 billion citizens and sent just over 400 competitors to the Athens Games. It seems fair to assume that if some of them did not perform to expectations, they will be replaced. When, finally, the monologue ended and we could ask questions, we discovered that it was not the pursuit of America at the top of the medal count that preoccupied China this time but the effort to stay above Russia in the gold rankings.
Of course, said Xiao, it is not in gold alone that China measures progress. But it did seem like a numbers job and Xiao acknowledged that there were six foreign trainers accompanying the team, and more imported into China to raise the standards and impart the secrets of western advanced sports training.
The budget for the current Olympic challenge is about £56m, but China is expected to pay for half its 2008 Olympic team preparations with commercial sponsorship.
Out of the fascinating calculations of Xiao we could glean the winds of change blowing through Chinese sport — literally in the case of the sailing, where it was acknowledged that Britons had shown the way here, but there would be different breezes off Qingdao in 2008, and Chinese sailors knew the ways of their fickle offshore winds.
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There were no questions or answers on drugs, partly because China had a zero detection level at the Athens Olympics, whereas America and Greece were not overly keen on raising the subject. However, with Ma’s infamous army of runners, and with the swimming scandals and coaches imported from East Germany, it will be interesting to see if the new Olympian crackdown on doping is carried forward to Beijing. It should be because the host city becomes effectively an IOC state for the duration of the Games.
The Chinese delegation here said they were not competent enough to answer questions on human rights, and that under the IOC membership it was out of the question that the People’s Republic, Hong Kong and Taiwan would march under the same banner.
For the rest, sport by sport, Xiao probably already has a projection of how many gold medals the hosts will expect to garner in Beijing — and by how much even the USA will languish behind.