DING JUNHUI, the 17-year-old sensation who was defeated in the quarter-finals of the Rileys Masters snooker yesterday, represents a minor tremor amid the biggest upheaval to have rocked sport since cash replaced the Corinthian spirit. China’s sporting revolution has been more of a sprint than a long march but it has shifted the epicentre of the sporting world decisively towards the East.
Opinion is divided as to whether this will prove to be a blessing or a curse. On the one hand it has generated riches that many sports are still giddily coming to terms with. China, with output growing at more than 9 per cent per year, is set to become the world’s largest economy by 2040 and companies are increasingly looking to sport to blaze a trail into the collective consciousness of 1.3 billion potential consumers.
World Snooker, which provided Ding with his second successive Masters wild card for unabashedly commercial reasons, is, if anything, behind the game. Formula One invested nearly £360million in last September’s inaugural Chinese Grand Prix near Shanghai and Bernie Ecclestone has guaranteed China a World Championship race until 2010. Expect a local driver to be fast-tracked on to the grid within a couple of years.
The China Open has become a serious event in golf’s European Tour and Volvo has chosen to back it, ending a 17-year sponsorship of the PGA Championship at Wentworth. This is a familiar tale in table tennis, with Volkswagen agreeing in 2003 to sponsor the Pro Tour with the proviso that it would cough up only for events staged in and around China. Even for European-based events, the priority of the governing body is to secure a broadcast platform on CCTV-5 (China’s main sports channel), thereby quadrupling the value of the commercial deal.
Football has been characteristically quick off the mark with Manchester United, for example, boasting a fan base of 25 million and rising. Other European clubs have signed China players predominantly to milk the merchandising cash cow. Sepp Blatter, the president of Fifa, has hinted that he would like China to host the World Cup in 2018, when the rotation returns to Asia.
Last November, darts announced its inaugural tournament in China. Boxing will stage November’s World Amateur Championships in Mianyang City. Even cricket, that most parochial of sports, is looking to infiltrate the market. The list goes on and on.
So much for the commercial upside. The more intriguing story lies in the corresponding threat presented by China’s newfound passion for sport. In 1988, China won five gold medals at the Olympics. By 2004 this had increased to 32 — only three behind the United States — including victories in athletics and tennis. Spurred by the political imperative of success in the home games in Beijing, there is little argument about which country will top the medal table in 2008. National Olympic associations around the world are beginning to fear the emergence of a new hegemony.
There is a profound irony here. Where economic growth has been achieved via the free-market reforms pioneered by Deng Xiaoping in the late Seventies and Eighties, the sporting successes have been a triumph of central planning that would leave Adam Smith spinning in his grave. The nerve centre is the China Sports Bureau, which is represented by a Cabinet-level ministry. Scouts are instructed to scour the country in search of talented children who are tested to determine if they are likely to develop for specific sports.
Parents are encouraged to send the lucky few to one of 3,000 specialist sports schools, from where successful pupils progress up the pyramid into provincial teams. The summit is represented by the National Training Centre, a huge complex of buildings in Beijing.
So far, so Orwellian. Gang Shoulin, a 62-year-old swimming coach, said: “Athletes don’t emerge naturally the way they do in rich countries. You have to pick out your athletes and make them.” But it is not just the rigour of the selection and development programmes that mark China apart. There are also the demands placed upon individual athletes that would not be tolerated in a democratic culture.
In January 2004, four table tennis players were booted out of the national team for going on a date. “Engaging in romantic affairs affects training,” the head coach said. Then, last month, Tian Liang, the Olympic gold medal-winner, was ditched from the national diving team for undertaking too much commercial activity.
Education is all too often shunted to one side in the quest for Olympic medals. Some former athletes, left on the scrap pile having come to the end of their sporting careers, are questioning the regime. So are some Western coaches who argue that the combination of brute numbers and totalitarian methods represents unfair competition. Those with a sense of history, however, regard the emerging pre-eminence of China as something that will spur the West to greater things.
LEADERS OF THE EASTERN EMPIRE
YAO MING
A 7ft 6in basketball player who plays for the Houston Rockets in the NBA. Lucrative endorsement deals have pushed his annual earnings above £30million
TIAN LIANG
Gold medal-winning diver in Athens who was thrown out of the national team last month for overenthusiastically embracing the superstar lifestyle
ZHANG YINING
Gold medal-winner in table tennis in Athens who learnt her trade at the Shishahai school in Beijing, one of China’s 3,000 specialist sports schools
