Imagine if Michael Phelps returned to the United States after the Rio Games, only to find the glory of his Olympics gold split between Maryland and Michigan.
This thought may seem strange on surface considering that athletes at international competitions generally represent their countries as a single entity, but this competition between provinces is very common in China. When Meng Suping won the gold medal in women’s 75 kilogram weightlifting, the credit was split between eastern China’s Anhui province, where she began her training, and southern China’s Guangdong province, where she currently trains.
This sharing of honor between provinces is related to the way the Chinese athletics system is set up. Since it is a national program, different levels of funding and rewards are distributed to provinces based on performance by their athletes. Until 2015, one of the main assessments used to judge performance was the number of medals won at the Olympics.
Most of Team China is handpicked based on athletic performance at China’s National Games. This competition is held every four years, and is strategically timed to fall three years before the Olympics. This timing is important since successful athletes at these games will immediately thereafter go into specialized training to get them ready to compete at the Summer Games three years later.
In 1994, China’s General Administration of Sports implemented a policy designed to connect the Olympics and the National Games. The athletes’ performances at the Olympics were converted to points then awarded to the provinces they belonged to, which determined the prestige, rewards, and funding each province received. It was important for the provinces to send their best athletes to the National Games, held the year after the Olympics, since victory there would determine who would qualify for the national team.
Consequently, this cycle caused fierce competition between provinces. Wu Jingyu, a gold medalist in taekwondo at the 2008 and 2012 Olympics, was born in Jiangxi province in eastern China in 1987, but moved to Jiangsu province, also in eastern China, with her coach in 2003.
There was an ensuing three-year tug-of-war where the sports administrations of both provinces tried to claim her. During this period she missed all of the domestic competitions since she couldn’t be registered as an athlete in either location. The problem was finally resolved when the State General Administration of Sports stepped in and proposed a method where the two provinces share Wu’s glory equally.
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This method of double scoring gave rise to a system of “joint training,” where an athlete is shared between two provinces or municipalities. Gifted athletes from poorer area can receive more funding, and access better training grounds, technologies, and medical facilities in more developed cities. The richer provinces get to share in the spoils the athlete delivers, while the poorer ones don’t have to take on the burden of funding athletic training.
However, while joint training may lead underprivileged athletes down the road to Olympic victory, in many cases sportspeople who could have won gold medals anyways simply become prey to provincial politics and are absorbed into joint agreements to benefit their superiors.
The Olympic athletes Pang Wei and Wang Zhiwei are two such examples. Pang is from Hebei province, northern China, and said to have been trained in Shanxi, also in northern China; Wang is from Shanxi, but was supposedly trained in Hebei. To ensure the greatest possibility of gaining medals, the two provinces entered into joint training of both athletes.
It’s becoming increasingly clear that this joint training program, originally intended to promote collaboration between underdeveloped and affluent areas, is often used as a tool in competing for gold medals between provinces. It’s similar in nature to people pooling their money together to buy lottery tickets: each person puts in less money than if they were by themselves, but has a better chance of winning the shared pot.
It also has negatively affected the fairness in athlete selection at competitions. Ji Jing qualified in 2012 for the Chinese team in the 53-kilogram class women’s weightlifting, but suffered an injury and was unable to compete.
Based on performance, Li Ping from central China’s Hunan province should have been the replacement, but the slot was eventually filled by a less-experienced athlete who had been jointly trained, and whose two provinces had bigger sway than Hunan did by itself.
Luckily, these problems have been heavily debated in China in recent years, and measures have been put in place to decrease competition between provinces. In 2015, China’s General Administration of Sports abolished the policy of allocating points for medals.
The sports administration has not yet abolished joint training, but with success at the Olympics no longer providing rewards, it will be interesting to see how national competition within China will be affected. Provinces no longer need to turn out world-class athletes — just ones good enough to win at the national level.
All we can do is wait and see if this negatively affects China’s performance at the Olympics. It seems the interest of many Chinese toward the Olympics has been waning in recent years, but maybe passion will be reignited as the gold medals begin disappearing.
(Header image: Wu Jingyu is pictured with her coach during the preliminary round of the women’s 49-kilogram taekwondo at the Rio Olympics, Brazil, Aug. 17, 2016. Issei Kato/Reuters)
markthem126com Broad Tones sports politics
Different Chinese regions team up to increase their chances of getting their athletes on the national team and winning medals. No 
