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How did China become a leading sports power?
Last reviewed: 01.07.2025
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China has become a leading sporting power, with athletes competing in almost every Olympic discipline. But at what cost?
Just twenty years ago, China was not considered a serious contender for first place in the Olympic race. Today, the Chinese are crushing the recognized favorites in a variety of sports. Many talk about the amazing system of training athletes, about the attention that the ruling Chinese Communist Party pays to the development of sports. They recommend that the Russian authorities adopt the Chinese experience.
The Daily Mail newspaper publishes bright, colorful illustrations of this "experience". In children's sports schools in China, future Olympians are being trained. Boys and girls from five years and older are practically broken into pieces, forcing them to squeeze professional flexibility, endurance, jumping ability and other qualities necessary for athletes out of their tiny bodies.
The photos were taken at a sports school in Nanning, a rapidly developing industrial city in China.
As British journalists write, this is one of many cruel training camps that are merciless towards children, the most brutal, whose workers have long been accustomed to not reacting to children's tears and screams.
Parents bring their children to children's sports schools hoping that they will be molded into future champions. Often these are representatives of the poorest families, and faith in the Olympic success of a child is faith in the possibility of leading a more financially worthy life. Fathers and mothers do not think that they are depriving their children of childhood, they say that they are doing this for the sake of the children themselves, who will then be able to become well-off and independent, without repeating the fate of their parents.
But only a few of these little Chinese will become champions. And most will have to live through several nightmarish years of the happiest period of a person's life to find out that from the point of view of professional sports they have no prospects.