Un-level Playing Fields — Doping, Sydney then and Paris now

Xi Jinping’s Empire of Tedium

藥比三家不吃虧

 

‘… it’s not really about athletes competing. What it’s really about is comparing drugs. If the drugs you’re using aren’t any good, you don’t have a hope.’

— a Chinese Olympic athlete interviewed by Sang Ye

 

After the revelation in April that 23 elite Chinese swimmers had tested positive for a banned substance months before the last Summer Olympic Games, China and the global antidoping authority vigorously defended their decisions to allow them to compete in the Games in 2021. The swimmers, they insisted, had not been doping.

But as they made those claims, China and the antidoping authority were both aware that three of those 23 swimmers had tested positive several years earlier for a different performance-enhancing drug and had escaped being publicly identified and suspended in that case as well, according to a secret report reviewed by The New York Times.

In both instances, China claimed that the swimmers had unwittingly ingested the banned substances, an explanation viewed with considerable skepticism by some antidoping experts. The two incidents add to longstanding suspicions among rival athletes about what they see as a pattern of Chinese doping and the unwillingness or inability of the global authority, the World Anti-Doping Agency, to deal with it.

— Michael S. Schmidt and Tariq Panja, Chinese Swimmers Twice Tested Positive for Drugs. They Kept on Swimming., The New York Times, 14 June 2024

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Performance-enhancing drug test irregularities, suspicions of doping, and questionable practices have dogged elite sports for many years. Chinese athletes have been under particular scrutiny from even before the 2000 Sydney Olympics. All too often, elite swimmers have been subjected to particular scrutiny.

In the lead up to Sydney 2000, there was a particular focus on the Ma Family Army 馬家軍, a squad of high-performing athletes led by the controversial coach Ma Junren 馬俊仁. Six distance runners were dropped from the Chinese national team on the eve of the Sydney Olympics after blood tests showed abnormal results and twenty-one other athletes — including four swimmers — were also cut from the team as a result of suspicious test results. Up to that point, through the 1990s Chinese swimmers had been surprisingly successful in international competitions, with the number of medalists leaping in 1992. Chinese athletes subsequently took twelve of the sixteen gold medals at the 1994 World Aquatics Championships and set five world records.

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In 1995, a decade after Sang Ye 桑曄, an oral historian who came to fame the previous decade when he and his collaborator, Zhang Xinxin 張辛欣, made headlines with Chinese Lives 北京人, a series of 100 interviews with everyday people, he conducted an oral history interview with a elite Chinese athlete. Sang Ye included the edited transcript of that interview in 1949, 1989, 1999, a volume of oral histories published by Oxford University Press in Hong Kong in 1999. That same year my translation of the interview appeared in HEAT, a minor Australian literary journal. During the controversy surrounding Chinese athletes prior to Sydney 2000, Sang Ye’s interview was plagiarised by an unscrupulous Sydney journalist and exploited as part of what soon turned into an unsavory controversy. (The journalist in question and his employer — a prominent Sydney broadsheet — prevaricated over the formal complaint I lodged protesting their infringement of Sang Ye’s copyright, while the editor of HEAT relished the fact that his meagre mag enjoyed a moment of notoriety.)

Never one for flag-waving and national self-congratulation, I spent the weeks before, during and after the Sydney Olympics in New York. The artist Cai Guo Qiang and his family invited me to watch the opening ceremony in their Manhattan apartment. At the time, none of us could have possibly imagined that, eight years later, Cai would create ‘The Footsteps of History’, a fireworks colossus that strode along the south-north axis of Old Peking as a prelude to the opening ceremony of the Beijing Summer Olympics (see China’s Flat Earth, China Quarterly, March 2009).

It is nearly three decades since Sang Ye spoke with that sixteen-year-old athlete, a humineral in every sense of the term, and a quarter of a century since my translation of that interview first appeared. As the spectre of doping, suspicions surrounding the reliability of the drug testing regime for elite athletes and doubts about the probity of international monitors are a focus yet again, this seems like an opportune moment to reprint an exchange between Sang Ye and his athlete interlocutor that revealed for the first time the dark underbelly of what would be celebrated as China’s ‘whole nation’ sporting prowess.

***

In June 2024, The New York Times report on Chinese doping summed up the influence of the latest scandal in the following way:

The discovery of even more hidden positives, and the prospect that some of the athletes involved will compete for medals at the Paris Olympic Games, is almost incomprehensible for other Olympians, said Mr. Koehler, of Global Athlete, who served as a deputy director of WADA until 2018.

“It will bring athletes’ confidence in the system to an all-time low, which I didn’t think was possible,” he said.

— Geremie R. Barmé
Editor, China Heritage
24 June 2024

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Further Reading:

In China Heritage:

Also by Sang Ye:

藥 yào, ‘medicine, drug’. Calligraphy in various hands

***

An Un-level Playing Field

Confessions of an Elite Athlete

an oral history interview by Sang Ye 桑曄

translated by Geremie R. Barmé

 

Before taking part in the Olympic Games or any major sports competition, Chinese athletes and their coaches undergo an intensive briefing session in PR skills.  They study an official Question and Answer booklet that bears the title You Must Respond Accordingly.  The correct answers to a range of questions contained therein are de rigueur for athletes when giving interviews or in any official or private exchange with outsiders.  Of course, if the athletes also happen to believe what they are saying it’s an added bonus.

For China, sport has little to do with sport per se.  It is not concerned with either physical health or personal wellbeing.  For the Chinese, athletic competitions are a struggle between political systems.  They are a heady opiate administered to salve dreams of national glory.

Sports grounds are the battlefields of peace.  When the Chinese discuss sport, they speak in the language of intense military engagement.  As Chairman Mao taught his people: ‘Fear neither hardship nor death’; ‘base everything on tactical considerations; storm and obliterate the enemy’s positions; fight tooth and nail; sport is combat,’ and so on and so forth.  When athletes retire they even call it being ‘discharged.’

But unlike the language, the struggle itself is not conducted according to the classic Maoist style of a people’s war.

China has over 2,600 counties, only one tenth of which have a sports field of any description and a swimming pool.  Of the sports fields only a few have running tracks, and virtually none of the swimming pools are tiled.  This is the momentous result of some twenty years of economic reform.

In the early 1980s, only eleven counties and cities had the wherewithal to provide people with regulation sporting facilities.  You might not believe it, but only one high school in the whole country had a swimming pool at that time.  If you calculate the per capita amount of space devoted to sports in China, it equals about 0.2 square meters.  That’s about the space a chair occupies; one sixtieth of the space available in Australia or the United States.

Given these constraints, the masses are hardly in a position to engage in people’s warfare.  Therefore the authorities have developed a strategy to ‘concentrate our superior forces’ for training to ‘break out of Asia and go international.’

In the years that the People’s Republic of China has existed, over 100,000 professional athletes have been trained.  Their work on behalf of the ‘population superpower’ of China has merely garnered the nation around 300 championships and thirty Olympic gold medals, and that’s including a few dozen ping-pong championships.

This interview was conducted in 1995 with a member of a Chinese national team at his winter training ground.  In accordance with his wishes, his identity, and the locale at which the interview was conducted, have been concealed.

— Sang Ye

Don’t say who I am, and don’t let on what sport I compete in.  If anyone asks, whatever you do, don’t let on that I was the one who spoke to you.

We’re under special discipline.  The leadership forbids us from talking about what goes on here with outsiders.  If you blab to the press, you can be held legally accountable.

How would I know where these rules come from?  Probably the National Sports Commission,[1] or maybe it’s the Athletics Training Bureau in the Commission.  Anyway, it means you’d better not say anything out of turn; and when you do talk in public you have to be sensitive about who, when and where.  You can’t just go rambling on to journalists, either Chinese or foreign.  You can only give interviews in the presence of a representative of the leadership.  If you give an inappropriate interview or say anything out of line, you have to take the rap.

It’s even more strict when you travel overseas.  During pre-travel induction they issue a booklet containing all the questions foreigners are likely to ask, along with all of the correct answers.  They tell us to learn it all off by heart.  If something comes up that’s not in the book we’re supposed to reply, ‘I can’t say for sure,’ or ‘I don’t know,’ or ‘Please refer that question to our PR officer.’  And that’s not only when we travel internationally; even before major competitions at home, like the Asian Games in 1990, they prepare a special booklet for us.  If you don’t believe me, I’ll find one for you.

I’m sixteen years old and I’ve been an athlete for eight years now.  I was accepted into a youth amateur athletics college when I was in my third year of primary school.  It wasn’t really for ‘amateurs’; it was actually semi-professional, though we did go to a few classes too.  Then I joined a professional team.  At first I was in our provincial ‘Hope Team.’  Yeah, that’s what they called it back home, the ‘Hope Team.’  In some provinces they call them ‘Youth Training Teams,’ or whatever.  It’s all much the same thing.  We were part of the professional establishment even though we were just kids.  Later on I was selected for the national team.  They say we’re all students in a sporting academy attached to the Beijing Sports University, but that’s only for external consumption.  In fact, we’re athletes.  We never go to classes; we’re professional athletes.

They say most people who enter major competitions have to be students or people with other employment, not professionals.  If you’re a pro then people aren’t going to want to compete with you.  That’s why we have to disguise ourselves a little; we can’t let on to outsiders that we’re really professionals.

That means I’ve only had a primary school education.  When I try to write a letter I can never manage to fill a whole page.  And don’t ask me how many mistakes I make.  Math?  I can’t do anything that includes brackets.  Anyway, there’s no need.  Now that we’ve all got direct dialing, you can ask for whatever you want; you don’t have to write it down.  You don’t have to write home any more either.  If you’re a champion, no one cares if you’re illiterate.  You can have anything you want.   If you’re lucky and win gold in the Olympics then everything’s taken care of.  Not just money-wise; you can become an official as well.  Take the women’s volleyball team, for example.  Except for the players who ended up going overseas, the rest are now all department or section heads in the bureaucracy.  If that doesn’t work out you can always go into advertising or start your own company.  You can trade on your reputation as a champion like Li Ning, the Olympic gymnast, with ‘Li Ning Brand Sportswear.’

I’ve taken part in three major competitions: two world championships and one Olympics.  I wasn’t in great form, so I didn’t win any medals.  But it’s not really about athletes competing.  What it’s really about is comparing drugs.  If the drugs you’re using aren’t any good, you don’t have a hope.  We orientals are biologically different from foreigners; we’ve got the skills and our reflexes are quick, but we just don’t have the stamina.  Relatively speaking we need to use drugs, and they’re pretty effective too.  I’m not making this up.   It’s the drugs that compete, not people.  Our women athletes grow beards from all the hormones they take.  Before competition they have to ‘shave’ with depilatory creams.

When you take part in international competitions you can see that for the foreigners it’s just a competition, might even be fun.  Win or lose, it’s only a matter of a little more or less sponsorship money.  It’s different for us.  It’s really intense.  ‘The Motherland and the People are waiting for you to fight a victorious war.  You must achieve glory for the nation!’  And it is just like going to war, too.  The pressure is immense.  It’s not the cushy job people think it is.

They put the fear of god into you the moment you get on the plane to go to the Olympics.  They let the athletes they think will take gold in the competition travel First Class.  Then if you don’t come good, if you fail to ‘break out of Asia and make it on the world stage,’ they throw you out of First and stick you in Economy on the way back because you don’t deserve it.

I was too young to go to the Seoul Olympics, but I heard the older athletes talking about it.  The long-jumper Zhu Jianhua and the male and female volleyball teams all got to travel First Class to Korea.  But none of them won gold, so on the return trip all those super-tall people had to scrunch themselves up into the seats at the back.  Their First Class seats went to the kids who’d got gold medals in swimming and gymnastics.  I didn’t believe them at first, but later I found out for myself.  I saw it with my own eyes when we came back from Barcelona [in 1992].  First Class for gold, Business for silver.  As for those of us who didn’t score a medal, we were all herded back into Economy.  They inspected your medals as carefully as your passport.  It was that strict!

Back in Beijing the medal winners got off the plane first, with their medals round their necks and big armfuls of flowers they were ushered straight into the VIP Lounge.  If you didn’t have a medal you could do whatever you wanted; no one gave us a second thought.

The most sickening thing was the official celebration banquet.  Everyone got different food; the medal winners sat there with new dishes being brought to their tables all the time.  And the worst thing of all was the group photograph.  We weren’t arranged in order of height but according to medals.  If you didn’t have one, and if you were short as well, then you ended up in the back row hidden behind the gold and silver medal winners.   No one cared what you looked like anyway.

Then there were the letters we started getting.  Things like, ‘Why aren’t you dead?  You’ve lived off our blood and sweat all these years for nothing.  You couldn’t even get sixth place!  And you still have face enough to go on living?  Why don’t you go hang yourself?’

But if you’d taken your drugs and actually won a medal, and then were found out and disqualified, no one would write to insult you.   The publicity people would hush it all up in China, so people wouldn’t know anything about it.  Even if they did find out, they’d think it was quite OK; it was just a shame that the foreigners had found you out.  Actually a lot of people wrote in offering secret traditional recipes that they thought foreigners would never be able to detect.

What I’m saying is that neither the party nor the people will let you lose.  If you do your family will never be left in peace.  I bummed out at the Olympics and didn’t get a place, and so people back home started abusing my mom and dad for having produced a birth defect like me, one that had lost face for the nation.  Someone slashed my dad’s bike tires, too, and my younger brother was beaten up.  He was so freaked out that it was ages before he dared to go back to school.

Then there are people who celebrate when China loses.  They’re not necessarily bad.  There are people on this street who let off firecrackers whenever a Chinese team loses, at least they did until the municipal government banned fireworks in 1993.  They weren’t in the Sports Commission, just local citizens.  Though there are actually people in the Commission who celebrate defeats too.

When the Olympics were broadcast live to Beijing some viewers applauded whenever the Chinese team lost.  They really used to hate the women volleyball players.  Every time they lost, people would shout, ‘We warmly celebrate the Chinese team retreating back to Asia and going local.’[2]  They wanted to embarrass Yuan Weimin.[3]  Haven’t you become a fat-cat official for your reputation in getting women’s volleyball onto the international stage?  Well, we’re going to give you a hard time over it.

Nowadays people tend to despise Ma Junren.[4]  His people did pretty well at the Olympics this time around, and when they returned from Barcelona they made a big deal of being ideologically sound as well as physically superior.  The line went that they had dared to go all out to win and were going to make China a track and field superpower.  But then in the world championships they only won a single medal.  Within a few days people were making jokes about it.  ‘Hey, our troops weren’t completely wiped out.  After all, there’s a fundamental difference between one medal and none at all.’

Every competition is going to have winners and losers.  Our problem is that we just don’t know how to lose.  People treat it like it is a crime.  We don’t know how to win, either.  When we do we act like we’re masters of the universe, and we make everyone else hate us.

There was this guy, a bicycle repairman we were all friendly with, who wrote this article about it.  ‘The national strategy to pursue gold at all costs is proof that we are not a strong nation.  The state invests over ten billion yuan in its athletes every year, just so they can win gold, to make face for ourselves.  It’s not only not worth it; it’s ludicrous.’  I think he had a point.  But the leadership responded by saying that this guy was undermining our morale.  In the past, he would have been denounced in an official campaign or something.  They don’t do that these days, but his ‘poison’ still needed to be purged, so they said that if he turned up here again no one was to take any notice of him or talk to him.  But what had he done wrong?  China does care too much about winning medals.  We treat winning gold like the be-all and end-all.  One gold medal in the Olympics and you can get a new apartment and a car.  It’s literally like a pot of gold: it’s worth tens of thousands of yuan to an athlete.  It’s got a price tag on it no one can miss, and we need as many as we can get.  If you score a few you can become a bureaucrat, sell ads, make music videos, do karaoke songs.  Even the Olympic sharpshooting champion Xu Haifeng has made karaoke recordings.  If I won a medal I’d be set.  I’m better looking than him, aren’t I?

‘The state invests ten billion yuan annually; you shame the nation if you lose.’  It’s statements like that really put the pressure on you.  But personally I don’t feel that I’ve ever let the country down.  I’m in a sport that relies on youth and early training.  Competitors in the All-American Opens and European championships are high school students.  We’re not like middle or long-distance runners who are still in major competitions right into their thirties or forties.  In my sport, if you haven’t won a medal by that time you’ve had it.  That’s why, when Chinese gymnasts or divers compete in world title competitions, we occasionally encounter foreign protests.  There’ll be people holding up placards at the airport and our interpreters will tell us on the sly what they’re saying.  They’re protesting against the exploitation of children and adolescents in athletics.  They attack the people in charge of us for exploiting us for personal gain.

I think the protesters are right.  We are exploited as kids.  Regardless of whether I win a medal or not, I reckon the state has treated me unfairly.  Anyway, I’m not like some people who think they’re something special even before they’ve been in competition, acting like they’re masters of the universe.

Everyone thought that the weightlifter Old He was going to win a gold medal.  Based on his usual performance, he certainly could have been a medalist.  Anyway, as soon as he hit the athletes’ village he started acting like a prima donna.  He said that being forced to walk everywhere was too draining, so the leadership bought him his own car.  Everyone else had to go on foot, including all the foreigners, or travel in buses.  He was the only one with his own vehicle.  It attracted a lot of attention.  Everyone ate in the athletes’ canteen, too, but he said that prior to competition he needed a special diet, so the leadership sent people out to buy him the ingredients for a special ginseng chicken soup.  They even had to buy a wok for his personal use.  The upshot of it all was that he still lost.  You can just imagine how much all the people at his beck and call hated the guy.  But we all knew that it would have been a major political incident if he had been refused all that special treatment and then lost.

Of course, special soups won’t win you medals, but they have their place, and they’re risk-free.  They can’t find any evidence of drugs in your urine because it’s all Chinese medicine, no hormones.  But forget about Old He’s ginseng soup; it’s General Ma’s Turtle Broth that really seems to do the trick.  Ma Junren says the reason that his people scored at the Olympics was that apart from doing the correct ideological work on them, and giving them the right amount of training, he made them all drink his secret soup.  They call it ‘Chinese Essence of Turtle.’  They say it’s made with a whole bunch of Chinese herbs, and you have to cook it for several days.  It’s supposed to contain like over fifty amino acids.  That’s what they’re called, isn’t it?  Anyway, they say it works wonders.  I’ve never had it myself; not everyone is allowed to.  They say the General Ma Chinese Essence of Turtle that you can buy in the shops is just a brand name and nothing like the thing they make for athletes.  The secret formula is really supposed to work, but only his team members get it.

I’m used to exhausting training sessions since I’ve been doing them since I was a kid.  But it’s still a really hard slog, incredibly tiring.  I haven’t had much of an education, so I can’t really describe it to you in so many words.  Just help me out and make up a few things to give your readers an idea.  It’s like, I often feel so exhausted I wish I could just drop dead on the spot.  If I happen to take a fall, I try to lie there on the ground for as long as I possibly can, even if it’s only for a few seconds.  But our coach is a real taskmaster.  He won’t let you die; he needs you to win medals for him.

The second you fall down he’s standing over you screaming his head off.  ‘What kind of fucking attitude is this?  If that’s the way you want it, just piss off home and play with yourself.’  So you have to drag yourself up and get back to practice.  ‘Call this hard?  The Long March was hard.  Ask an old revolutionary what hard is.’  This is the only place in China where people still carry on with all that Cultural Revolution stuff.

As long as we can improve our performance and our fitness, I can handle all the training.  What I really hate is when the scientists come along to record training sessions on video so they can analyze what you’re doing wrong.  Then they decide what you’ve got to concentrate on.  Whatever it is, you have to practice it until you improve.  My brain goes numb whenever I see those training schedules.  I just want to lie down and die.

A couple of years back they said I didn’t have enough stamina in my back, stomach and leg muscles, and no matter how good my technique got it would still affect my performance.  So, during one whole winter training season, they made me concentrate on running, jumping, throwing and weight lifting.  Then they decided that my stamina was being undercut by a lack of lung capacity, so whenever I exerted myself I’d be short of oxygen.  So they made me concentrate on running.  Every morning after warm-up I had to do laps of the running field.  Twenty kilometers a day was just for starters; after a couple of weeks they started upping the mileage bit by bit.  Pretty soon I was running a marathon every day.  I was exhausted.  But after the run there was the next thing to work on.  If all I had to do was run, it would have been great—but the coach would say that running was all well and good, but I couldn’t let my specialist training go.  He’d quote the old saying, ‘Only when you suffer in the extreme can you become a superior being.’  ‘Anyway,’ he’d say, ‘young boys can take a bit of punishment.’

There are times when you’re so exhausted and thirsty that it takes you ages to build up the energy to go get yourself a drink, even if it’s only a few meters away.  The only thing in your body that is still active is your brain.  I react to overtraining like that by throwing up.  You’re completely exhausted, they make you work some more, you throw up, but they don’t think you’re really sick, so they make you carry on.  Sports scientists say that you need about six thousand calories a day, but actually you can get by on two or three thousand, even if you have to work out extra hard.  If you tell them you’re so tired that you have wet dreams they say you only lose five to ten calories of body heat when you come, so don’t worry.  Just keep training.  I don’t think they really think of us as people.  They’re all university graduates with higher degrees.  They reckon athletes are all brawn and no brain, so they despise us.  Well, even if we are that’s because the state requires it, it’s not because we wanted it that way.

Our coaches are ignorant like us—they don’t know about science either.  All they’re doing is ‘drawing tigers by looking at cats.’  They haven’t got it quite right; everything’s all out of proportion.  They tell you, ‘I won gold by doing it this way, so you’re going to get exactly the same training.’  It’s like they’re your master and you’ve got no choice at all.  ‘If I say go right, then you’d better not go left.’  When they were athletes the policy was the same as the old People’s Liberation army approach to military training, Three Proceed Froms and One Maximize.  ‘Proceed from the difficult, the serious and the practical needs of competition and maximize training.’  Back in the 1960s they bumbled along with the most primitive policy of self-reliance; and now they’re applying exactly the same principles to us.  They say that regardless of all the talk about reform, the old method of revolutionary enthusiasm and heroic hard work is still the way to go.  In fact, it’s to their advantage to make us achieve.  That way they can get more money in bonuses and they can get promotions too.  If you ask me, that’s what they’re really in it for.  Those old homespun methods and science on top of that—we can’t get away with anything.  It’s murder.

Our coach says, ‘You’ve hardly started working out and already you’re saying you’re tired and in pain.  Is that fair to China?  Is it fair to me?  If it’s too hard for you, then get out!  But I’ll tell you something: no one back home will want you unless you take a medal with you.’  Ain’t that the truth!  The scientists might think it’s all about applying scientific methods, but our coach only cares about you putting up with pain and hard training, turning sweat into gold.  Then there’s all the layers of political commissars in charge of our ideological purity.  They’re always going on about the need to arm ourselves spiritually, the importance of the human factor in victory; how every threat must be neutralized.  All day they’re telling us that we have to achieve or else.  Win glory for the nation or else!

We’re forbidden to marry, and we’re not allowed girlfriends.  We’re not even allowed to go out shopping.  No eating between meals, no drinking beer.  No staying up late; no chatter or gossip; and we’re not allowed to get to know people outside….  There’s like a million and one restrictions.  At major competitions and in intensive pre-competition training, there are even more rules and regulations.  You’re not allowed to do anything!  You can’t meet friends or relatives, leave the training camp, have time off, watch TV or listen to the radio, let alone read the papers.  They reckon that would distract us.  So much for ‘breaking out of Asia and going international.’  We’re not even allowed to know what’s going on overseas!

Chinese athletes weren’t particularly disappointed when we didn’t get the 2000 Olympics.  It’s the same competition no matter where they hold it; and going overseas is better for us than staying at home.  If we’re on home turf then the spectators would be Chinese and I can just imagine the type of pressure they’d put on us.  And then there were all those companies that offered to train teams under contract for the Olympics.  That type of thing has actually been going on for ages.  When government money started getting tight, they called for industry sponsorship.  They call it ‘official athletics with popular support’ or ‘privately outsourced official athletics,’ and they’ve created club teams with it.  I don’t know why they think it’s a ‘reform.’  It’s really bad news.  We haven’t got anything out of it.  The state’s still there putting pressure on you to ‘win glory for the nation’ but now you’ve got pressure from these capitalists as well, expecting you to be successful so you’ll make their companies famous.  They’re even worse than the government, because they pump up the pressure even for local meets, not just international ones.  The pharmaceutical companies are the worst.  They divide the teams up—you’re this brand, he’s that brand—and then put their ads up all around the stadium.  It’s cool if it’s Sony or Nike, there’s no loss of face competing under the logo of a major multinational.  But making me play for some drug company whose slogan is ‘Just one application and the embarrassing soreness will be gone forever’ makes me feel like I’m living proof of their VD cures or something.

In my opinion, sport in China has nothing to do with improving the standard of public health.  It’s all about earning gold medals and winning glory for China.  It’s completely different from the spirit in Mao’s day, ‘Develop physical education and improve the people’s health.’  They might still use the slogan but nowadays it’s all about training specialist athletes and forcing us to win gold for the state.  The people have got absolutely nothing to do with it.  But the physical condition of the athletes actually deteriorates with all that overtraining; by the time they quit the squad they’re either permanently injured or sick.  The women in Lang Ping’s medal-winning volleyball team were all a complete mess when they left, yet they’re held up as being the model for all the rest of us.  We’re all supposed to emulate them for not leaving the court when they were injured, and not crying even when they were seriously hurt.  It’s got better propaganda value if you get gold despite an injury.

The authorities are always going on about how the hope for the revitalization of China rests with us.  The whole nation has its eyes on us.  We’re soldiers fighting a political war, a war to inspire the whole Chinese race.  With this kind of emotional blackmail, plus the sheer physical demands of our training schedule, the pressure is so great that I sometimes think about killing myself.  My family mean well, but they’re still adding to the pressure: ‘You’re the only one in our family that has really made it.  Don’t quit whatever you do.’  There are actually people who can’t cope with all of that and they do end up killing themselves, or intentionally get injured so they can get out of having to compete.  I’ve got this friend who generally performs pretty well.  She’s one of the best in the world at her particular sport, though maybe not the very best.  Anyway, she could win medals in an international championship.  It’s not like running, jumping or throwing; her type of competition depends on how you perform over a period of time during a match.  Like, if you start out badly, there’s no way you can turn that around.  And how you play is very much influenced by the crowd’s response.  If you’re playing on the opposing team’s home ground, for example, and the crowd applauds when you miss the vital shot.  Anyway, this friend of mine wasn’t playing her best one time, and she was faced with a final on the home ground of the opposition.  The pressure was just too much and she was convinced she couldn’t win, but she was equally terrified of losing.  So she secretly injured herself.  She told the leadership that she’d been attacked by an enemy agent and they’d also broken her racket.  She shouldn’t have done that.  Our athletes are pretty uneducated, and she thought they would be fooled—but they saw through it right away.  They declared that she was selfish and ideologically unsound, that she was psychologically unfit and an embarrassment to the nation.  So they threw her out.  Things like that make people want to defect when they’re overseas.  It happens a lot.  There have also been cases where frustrated athletes have killed their coaches.  There’s no way they can keep us from finding out about things like that.  But we’re forbidden to discuss it.  They hope you’ll just forget all about it.

In fact, I’m not scared of the spectators, I hate them, in particular the overseas Chinese who come to watch major international events.  When people back home insult you after you’ve lost a competition overseas it’s not that big a deal, after all; everything we eat and use comes from our own people.  But the overseas Chinese!  If we win we’re national heroes; if we lose we’re nothing more than traitors and scum.  They have it pretty good overseas, but they always have this inferiority complex thing going.  They hate foreigners and they see us as representing China in their own war with the white man.  But they don’t love China; they only love themselves.  They’re not there for the competition; they’re there to see the flag of the People’s Republic of China go up.  They’re waiting for us to make them feel proud.  So if you can’t get the Five-Star Red Flag up there, if you don’t make them feel like big shots in front of all the foreigners, then you’re nothing more than a big traitor.

I don’t think you can say all drug taking is bad or inappropriate.  We orientals—us, Japanese and Koreans—are racially Asian.  We’re naturally smaller and our endurance is not as good as foreigners.  If we don’t take drugs we’ll come off second best.  Take the ball sports, for example.  Whether it’s soccer, basketball, volleyball, tennis or badminton, given the standard size of the field or court, it’s obvious that shorter people will have to run and move about more than taller people.  That’s particularly true when you’re on the defensive.  If you’re not quick enough, no matter how good your technique is, you just can’t keep up.  If you can’t get to the ball you’re dead.  Given that you don’t have the same stamina as foreigners, you’re burning up more energy.  It doesn’t make any difference if you do really long, intensive training sessions or train at high altitudes.  You’re still not the same as those foreigners; you’re racially different.  If you don’t take drugs then you’re going to lose out for sure.  With drugs at least you can keep going a bit longer.  Track and field, swimming, winter Olympic sports, it’s the same for all of them.  Even sharpshooters take drugs.

The situation is a bit different at competitions inside China, though people still use drugs when necessary.  Everyone else is taking them, so if you don’t eat a little ‘chocolate’ too then you’ll miss out.  Sure it’s not real chocolate; all chocolate can do is give you a few extra calories to burn.

You’re absolutely forbidden to take anything without supervision.  What if something goes wrong?  Who’s going to take the political responsibility for it?  Provincial and municipal teams are more casual about such things, more flexible.  You’ve got more freedom there to make money and take the drugs you want to.  You can earn money by taking part in local competitions, representing other people.  They get the placing, but you get the cash.  Say, for example, you’re in the Hope Team of Guangdong Province and, according to the regulations, you’re only allowed to represent Guangdong.  In reality, Guangdong can lease you to Guangxi Province, or Shandong, or even the Datong Coal Mines, the Aeronautical Corporation, or whatever.  Anyone who can pay can hire you for a while.  But you can’t get away with that at the National Sports Competition, because athletes have to represent their own provinces and cities, and everyone’s watching everyone else to make sure that’s how it’s done.  But no one cares in inter-city and inter-provincial competitions.  So you go out and hire someone from a place that’s not participating in that meet.  If you don’t, your side is going to lose.

The principle’s the same as taking drugs.  It’s an open secret.  It happens at every level except the All-China Sporting Competition.  It goes on at other national-level events, such as sports meets for workers or farmers, at inter-city games and the national student games too.  The same athletes are there at all the games—whatever competition it is, you’ll see the same faces.  We all know each other.  And drug taking is commonplace.  You can take anything you like, as long as you don’t get caught.  Anything at all, including strange and secret formulas, Chinese or Western: Royal Jelly, Tortoise Essence, placenta fluid, human globulin, you name it.  When I was in the Hope Team I took them all, one after another, match after match.  Semen and menstrual blood are about the only things I haven’t tried.  Back then they still hadn’t come up with Tortoise Essence.  They gave us an aphrodisiac, ‘Treasure of Youth,’ to keep us alert.  The most disgusting thing was taking tissue fluid from dead children.  They got the bodies from the hospital.  They say it only works if it’s a baby boy from an unmarried woman.

I don’t think the homegrown recipes really work all that well.  The more you take, the less effective they are.  As far as I’m concerned, the best thing for improving your stamina is still norephedrine.  Those little white beauties are miraculous.  If you take them when you’re exhausted they’ll pick you up every time.  The only problem is that they can be picked up in drug tests.  So in the national team we’re not allowed to touch them.

Members of the national team like me don’t have a clue what drugs we’re being given, regardless of whether they’re taken orally or by injection.  The team physicians say they’re vitamins, so that’s what we call them.  They’re always being changed; there are always new ‘vitamins’ to take.  We have all our meals in our own canteen and the nutritionist gives you special medicinal food, with who-knows-what supplements.  Duck with rhizoma gastrodiae, venison with lycium chinensis, they’re nutritional supplements and they’re not against the rules of the game.  Who knows if there’s anything else mixed in there?  As long as it can’t be detected, nothing you take is illegal.  If something is discovered the officials deny all responsibility; our doctors claim that we don’t even have those drugs; and the athletes say they never take any drugs.  We deny everything.  Just stick with the facts.  All the foreigners can do is strip us of the medals.  Among the scientists there are people who are specialists in drug research.  In particular they work on drugs that increase your stamina but that can’t be detected by the foreigners.  Obviously their research is less than perfect, otherwise the foreigners wouldn’t have been able to strip our swimmers and winter athletes of all those medals.

Sure, there are some people who get their own drugs and take them on the sly.  Female athletes tend to go for Chinese medicines, because male hormones are detectable.  But none of those foreign testing instruments can tell if you’ve taken Male Precious or Golden Gun Power Pills.  You can find aphrodisiacs like these all over the place, especially at stores like Garden of Eden and Real Man.[5]  And they’re good quality, too.  The stuff you get elsewhere is often just fake, and it often contains additives like western drugs.  That makes them dangerous because you don’t have a clue what’s really in them, and they might be detected in the drug tests.  I know all about this stuff because I went shopping with a friend—she was too scared to go to Garden of Eden by herself.  She was afraid they’d ask her what a girl of her age wanted to buy that stuff for.  Of course no one asked her anything.  As long as you can pay for it, they’ll sell you whatever you want, even if you’re only a three year-old.  I really didn’t want her taking anything like that, because it makes you really aggressive.  But the pressure was on her to win a medal, just like me, so she couldn’t leave anything to chance.

I agree.  It just isn’t worth it in the end.  All of that effort just for the sake of a few medals.  And even if you win one, all you get as a reward is an IOU.  When they give you a big red envelope at the victory awards it’s always empty.  All you get is a certificate; the cash is supposed to come later.  But before you’ve seen a cent of it, people from back home are all over you asking for donations.  There’s the people from the primary school, and even people with cancer come and search you out.  If you’ve got a conscience you have to borrow money to help them out first.  So from that point of view, all that work to win a medal and then all the stuff that happens afterwards, it really isn’t worth it.

But this is all I’ve ever been trained to do.  I don’t know how to do anything but go for gold.  Some of my old classmates went off to technical schools, and some are taking the university entrance exams.  Even if I could start all over again, I wouldn’t even be able to get into high school.  Once you’re in this game there’s no turning back; like it or not, you’ve got to fight to get a medal.  Once you’ve got that medal, you’re set.  If I haven’t won by the time I retire then the rest of my life will be screwed.  My ideal is to win a medal.  The moment I get one, even a bronze, I’m out of here.  I’d never hang around for the next Olympics.

I’m nearly seventeen.  And as that karaoke song goes: life is a one-way highway.  I’m using my youth to gamble on the future.  I’ve just got to win a medal no matter what.

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[1]  From 2003 called the State General Administration of Sports.

[2]  A satirical reversal of the official 1980s’ slogan to ‘break out of Asia and go international’ chongchu Yazhou, zouxiang shijie.

[3]  A former volleyball coach who was promoted to vice-chairman of the Sports Commission.

[4]  The famed coach of ‘General Ma’s Army’ of runners from Liaoning Province whose international disrepute eventually led him and his ‘army’ being dropped from the Chinese Olympic squad for the 2000 Sydney Olympics.

[5]  Beijing sex-aid shops.

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藥 yào, ‘medicine, drug’, in the hand of Huaisu 懷素, a Tang-dynasty monk