Beijing Games may change China's sporting template

BEIJING • China's most successful Winter Olympics team are a motley line-up that include the son of hockey legend Chris Chelios, a former child actor, and a Louis Vuitton model, and it could be the future of sports in the country.

While China has long been dominant at the summer Games, it had never enjoyed the same success in winter disciplines because it lacked a developed system of coaches, willing pupils and familiarity with ice and snow sports.

To build this year's 178-person delegation - more than double the number at Pyeongchang 2018 - China went on a search at home and abroad for winners.

That formula has brought the country a record number of gold medals in the Winter Olympics and its success could signal a new direction for how China develops sporting talent in the future.

Still, it is a strategy that is fraught with uncertainty as it contends with growing nationalism in China and a strong reliance on training champions through a state system.

"What China has tried to do is - it has tried to fast track sporting success," said Simon Chadwick, a professor of global sport at Emlyon Business School in France.

"This is a way of preventing embarrassment, saving face, making sure that they do win medals."

The traditional state-driven system has long relied on identifying children who have potential and then putting them through a rigorous training regimen, and has been extremely successful in sports such as weightlifting and diving. In last year's Tokyo Olympics, China took home 38 gold medals, just one less than the top-ranked United States.

Winter sports like snowboarding and skiing, however, tend to reward traits like freestyle individualism and artistry, which the state system has struggled to teach.

China had already wanted to encourage more home-grown talent outside of the system since the 1980s, but the strategy just started to pay off recently, said Susan Brownell, an anthropology professor at the University of Missouri-St Louis, who researches sport in the country.

China hit the jackpot with Su Yiming, a snowboarder who won gold and silver medals just a few days shy of his 18th birthday.

He was a successful child actor who only decided to pursue snowboarding full-time when he was 14, after China won the Olympics bid.

Su was scouted in a national programme in 2018 that sought out athletes in a wide range of sports, according to a documentary last year by state broadcaster CCTV.

About one-fifth of Chinese athletes at the Winter Games came through this programme, the People's Daily said on Wednesday.

Unlike typical Chinese athletes, Su was already well-known in snow sports circles, had sponsorship deals with major brands and led a peripatetic lifestyle, spending time in Japan with his Japanese coach.

A column published in influential Chinese business publication Caixin after Su won his second medal said the snowboarder had "ripped a small hole" in China's state sports system and will change history by opening the door for more athletes like him.

"I've been trying to show my different sides in order to present a diverse version of myself," he said on Tuesday, after winning gold.

China's other pathway to Games glory is the naturalisation of foreigners.

Still, for a country with a mostly homogeneous population with strict naturalisation laws, the presence of non-Chinese athletes competing for China is a particularly striking one.

The ideal foreign-born athlete might be someone like Eileen Gu, the 18-year-old freestyle skier and fashion model - born in the US to an American dad and a Chinese mum - who decided in 2019 to compete for China in the Olympics.

In other disciplines, most notably ice hockey, China came up with some unusual ways of bringing on talent.

It created a professional hockey team, the Kunlun Red Star, who play in Russia.

Everyone on the Chinese Olympic ice hockey team plays for Red Star, including both foreigners of Chinese descent and Americans with no known Chinese ancestry.

One is Jake Chelios, son of former Olympian and Hockey Hall of Famer Chris, who goes by the Chinese phonetic translation of his name, Jieke Kailiaosi, at the Games.

But Brownell said that being a foreign face "could be perceived quite favourably because they don't see you representing the nation in the sense that you were born and raised in China. But rather, you were some accomplished person who, in a sense, endorsed China".

The citizenship status of many of the foreign athletes remain unclear, however, because of China's strict rules against dual citizenship. When asked last week, Chelios said the question would have to be answered by the Chinese staff.

Gu and her representatives have also repeatedly dodged questions about her nationality.

It remains to be seen how much the Chinese public will embrace foreign-born athletes.

BLOOMBERG