If Ian Thorpe, Lord Coe, and Lord Moynihan aren’t bothered about China’s phenomenal swimmer, Ye Shiwen, neither am I. I was in Hong Kong when the Chinese swimmers Adam’s-apples bobbing and heavily muscled, won most of the golds from which they were soon parted for having eaten cart-loads of steroids. The same fate befell China’s long-distance runners whose coach tried to explain their astounding success because of the odd things they ate.
What attracted the attention of a few high Olympic officials was 16-year-old Ye’s first record-breaking swim, in which she cut five seconds off her previous best and swam faster than the fastest American man. The Australian Ian Thorpe, known in Australia as the Thorpedo and whose swimming commentary is the best, said that between ages 15 and 16 he too knocked five seconds off his previous best, and noted as well that no-one was questioning the Lithuanian swimmer, aged 15, who just came from nowhere to win gold. Thorpe explained that the ‘teens are exactly when times can be slashed by whole seconds, while nearly past-it swimmers in their twenties are lucky to knock off fractions of seconds’. Sixty years ago, when I was a teenager, I swam competitively – although far from Olympic standards; we expected big improvements in our times, and we swam a mere two hours a day.
We all gasp with amazement when we learn that this or that Western athlete has been swimming, diving, running, doing gymnastics and judo since they were spotted by some teacher or coach when they were five, gets up every morning at 5:30, six days a week, is driven to the pool or gym usually by their mother, and eats 5,000 calories every day. They do this for years and usually, like most Chinese, fail to get anywhere near the podium. The greatest swimmer ever, Michael Phelps, was beaten in his best event this week by a 20-year-old South African whom he calls ‘a very nice kid’. Adlington’s bronze last week was for a swim faster than the one for which she won gold in Beijing.
Now it is true that the Chinese have a bad doping record. But Ye has been tested many times, including in London, and what’s more she has done some of her training in Australia where any doping would have been spotted at once. More to the point is that her training regimen, from when she was six or seven, and was picked out of a population of well over a billion, included being taken to a special sports centre away from her family, is normal in China. ‘If my coach tells me to swim 10,000 metres,’ she says, ‘I don’t swim 9,000.’
It is also true that China attaches a lot of patriotic words to the successes of its athletes, like ‘national power’, ‘glory’, and ‘pride’, but how different is that from our own British patriotism during these Games? It is true, though, that the words ‘awfully good effort’ are tagged on to the British losers: words never heard in China.
Let’s forget for 10 seconds that a Chinese mega-winner, Nobel Peace Prize laureate, Liu Xiaobo, is serving eleven years for sedition.
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