Karl Marx and Adam Smith would have cheered avidly at the Diving
World Cup two weeks ago in Beijing. Trailing China—which swept gold
medals in seven of eight categories—were Russia, Canada, Great Britain,
Ukraine and USA. In other words, the top six teams in the Men’s 3 Meter
Synchronized event were evenly split between historically Communist and
Free Market traditions.
How do the diving styles vary between
these two systems? And how do they evoke the different training
programs that got their divers to the Water Cube? I decided to take a
closer look at the national training programs behind each set of divers.
Wang
Feng and Qin Kai, the Chinese representatives, performed their dives
with absolute precision: bodies angled like a geometric compass, legs
glued together, feet pointed after years of ballet training. Their
movements were synchronized from the moment they began to ascend
the three-meter-high boards—which was even before the judges eyed them.
Leon Taylor, of the Great Britain team, described the Chinese divers
“as robots.” He wasn't the only one to find, as he put it, “something
vaguely dehumanizing about their perfect symmetry. You’d think they
were identical twins.”
Despite China’s achievements on that day,
Zhou Jihong, director of the Chinese national diving team, afterwards
told the official Xinhua News Agency that the World Cup was "just a
training session.” Xinhua said that "Zhou makes it clear to China’s
divers that their gold status is a temporary position." No surprise
that Wang wasted no time basking in the limelight; he said he
was already preparing to "get focused on [our] small errors and try to
get rid of them.”
China’s Olympic athletes are learning to
live with the dual demands of both a regimented Soviet-styled system
and the celebrity world of corporate endorsements, as described in an earlier post by Jonathan Ansfield.
The Russian program, on the other hand, openly favors the “carrot”,
and not the “stick,” approach these days. Moscow’s Olympic team members
receive $500 worth of monthly allowances, described as“a good incentive
to work hard” by Leonid Tyagachev, chairman of the Russian Olympic
Committee, just prior to the Athens Games. At that point, the
government had also promised tax-free bonuses—up to $50,000 for gold
medalists.
This doesn’t mean Russian athletes are living off
the fat of the land. The controlled, rigid take-offs and flips of Yuriy
Kunakov and renowned careerist Dmitry Sautin evoked their severe, at
times bare-bones, training approach.
In contrast, Canadians
Arturo Miranda and Alexandre Despatie (a medaled soloist in his own
right) are the product of a program which seems designed to keep the
diver—no matter the level of skill—self-fulfilled and in pursuit of
personal excellence. Divers training under this model come to the
program of their own volition, and ideally decide to stay without
governmental pressure or financial need (though commercial money no
doubt helps). The Canadians performed the most graceful, carefree and
lithe dives I’d seen that day.
After receiving their bronze medal, the duo seemed neither excited
nor deflated. Miranda explained, “I am happy overall with our
performance. We will do better next time." Despatie admitted that “we
didn’t have the impression we dove so badly” even though they were in
last place after the first two dives. Quite the lighthearted response
from a team that just placed third globally after years of training.
Whereas
China culls its 1.3 billion-strong population for ripe young talent to
train throughout their youth, Great Britons Benjamin Swain and Nicholas
Robinson-Baker began training together barely a year before ascending
to their fourth place finish at the World Cup. Then again, the
noticeably mature presence of the British duo made me feel that these
were real people, with real pressures, sitting on their shoulders. The
dives were a learned, cerebral precision. According to Swain, the
pair’s relaxed, almost debonair, approach made all the difference. “We
loved every minute of it, felt relaxed throughout and couldn’t wait for
our next round of dives.”
Enjoyment seems an incentive for the
U.S. team, as well. The home-page of the Indiana Diving program, where
the States are now training their divers, opens with a letter to
parents and divers declaring: “Let’s learn, train and most importantly
have some fun!” It’s a contract between the program and the athlete,
with the former telling the latter, “we appreciate your confidence in
us.”
Unfortunately, the U.S. program has struggled recently:
the American divers didn’t place in Athens, and in Beijing, Jevon
Tarantino and Christopher Colwill yo-yo’d erratically in the clarity
and coordination of their dives that day.
In fact, U.S.
officials have considered shifting their strategy by taking a page or
two from the Chinese approach. Increasingly, they've centralized their
training in Indiana, where many hopefuls move to train full-time. And
they’re starting to seek out promising girls and boys at a younger age.
As
for the Ukrainian training program, there was no mention of their
strategy. Their divers, Dmytrio Lysenko and Anton Zakharov, weren't
interviewed in any news media I ran across. All I remember during their
dives was being disturbed by spectators getting up to buy ice cream and
pop corn before the Chinese took their turn on the boards again.
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