08/15/2012

Phys Ed, China’s Losing Game

By CLARISSA SEBAG-MONTEFIORE

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A young gymnast practiced on the balance beam at a juvenile gymnastics training base in Wuhan, Hubei province.

BEIJING — China may be racking up medals at the Olympics in London and it may have celebrated National Fitness Day on Aug. 8, yet it’s anything but a nation of athletes.

Even though the 2008 Beijing Olympics, with their muscular opening ceremony and new records, put China at the center of the sporting map, they have failed to popularize sports among the Chinese. Some say they’ve even had the opposite effect.

“The culture created around the Olympics is that sports is something for the elite: if you can’t win medals, you have no interest,” Paul French, a co-author of “Fat China: How Expanding Waistlines are Changing a Nation,” told me. “People live an even more sedentary lifestyle.”

The legacy of the Beijing Olympics has been to promote grand performances rather than grassroots change. Special programs pluck promising athletes from mainstream education, channeling them into a vast state sports system inspired by the Soviet Union. Other children are excluded because they are considered to be the wrong height or weight.

Read more at International Herald Tribune

Aug 15, 2012 3:11:33 AM | Current Affairs

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