Archives » Thursday, October 11, 2007
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Jonathan Ansfield
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Oct 11, 2007 09:38 PM
Gymnast Cheng Fei is learning a tricky new balancing act. At the age of
seven, she was drafted into China’s state-funded sport system. All it
ever wanted out of her was Olympic gold, and she’s complied. Now
commercial sponsors also fancy a piece of Cheng, at 18 a triple world
champion. But under state rules, athletes are “managed” by their
trainers, and only pocket half their endorsement proceeds. Meanwhile
the state gymnastics federation is carefully limiting such
transactions, stresses Xie Chunhui, of its marketing department. So
when officials informed Cheng of her first solo advertisement—shot for
a brand of toothpaste earlier this year—“she really didn’t get the
concept” recounts pal Liu Xuan, a former Olympic champ turned screen
starlet. She tells Newsweek that Cheng whimpered: “Is it alright if I
don’t shoot it? I need to train.”
For half a century, Chinese athletes knew nothing but training.
Patterned after the rigid Soviet model, China’s sports machine has been
tarnished by 90’s tales of doping which sank its female swimmers and of
neglect that left one ex-wrestler scrubbing people’s feet for a living.
Even today, the state builds, owns and effectively operates athletes
from wee youth through retirement. Coaches’ careers still hinge on gold
medals, and the guiding ethos remains glory to the nation, at most any
cost. But in the past decade, the market has muscled in; today the
business of sport rakes in approximately USD 5 billion a year, five
times more than a decade ago. With that have come ads, agents,
paparazzi and now blogs, thrusting cloistered kids into a dual role as
celebrity jock stars.
As the Beijing Olympics draw near, the
sports system as a whole is leading a schizoid existence. Long-awaited
reforms to free up the market and spend instead on fitness for the
masses have been delayed, experts say, precisely because of the
old-fashioned obsession with medal supremacy in 2008. The ranks of
state recruits have swelled. China went to Athens in 2004 with its
training wheels on—80 percent of the team were Olympic rookies—and
finished three golds shy of the United States. It would beat the USA by
eleven were the Games held today, the British Olympic Association
concluded not long ago. “Right now, everything is about 2008,” sums up
Hong Kong agent Rey Chiu, who represents Liu.
Technically,
federation officials remain the state-appointed agents of active
athletes. But the more marketable the star, the more likely he or she
will gain private representation—as Houston Rockets big man Yao Ming so
amply showed. In turn, state teams are dangling fatter and fatter medal
bonuses: up to hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash, plus villas
and cars are dangled before state teams as medal incentives.
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