It's possibly true that some countries may be mad for losing dominance, but the issue in question is an ethical one. Doping, gene tampering, and training programs since youth solely for the purpose of winning gold is materialistic, unsportsmanlike, obsessive and stupid.
It certainly shows that politics can sometimes impede upon sports, or vice versa. For those that don't know what's going on with this, here's an explanation: LINK Here's another comment on the PRC's medal chase methods: LINK ...And check out this guy: LINK
One of the less recognized Olympic related phenomenon is the exodus of great coaches from communist (or former) nations that then wind up helping western nations compete. Case in point; the recent win by Gabby Douglas for the women's gymnastic all around highlighted her and her family's sacrifice so that they could avail themselves of a great coach, Liang Chow. Before him, was Bela Karolyi. If people want to make political hay from these Olympiads, then one cannot ignore that coaches, many of them former athletes themselves, often look westward for better opportunity. If the Olympics are to be considered as proxy warfare between nations, then the distancing by their best talent into the fold of their former adversary's camp can be seen as nothing less than traitorous betrayal. This would leave any astute observer wondering as to the whys of such a move.
One of basic principles that science rigidly adheres is to first assess whether a test itself can rightfully be called a legitimate process in determining the validity of an event. Else, the results obtained would be considered questionable and little faith would be placed in those outcomes. In this case, even the FIE admitted that their technical process for this match was shown to be scientifically inadequate or not up to the task. Thus, I personally believe that the entire contest should have been thrown out and the whole match, from start to finish, be replayed. This "special award" is rather just a nonsensical way of the FIE admitting that they were caught unprepared. Because of it, they were not only embarrassed at not being able to properly score a match, but worse yet, decided to summarily sweep the whole thing under the rug and just arbitrarily declare a winner in order to save face. IMHO, the loser here is the FIE; in doing this (first making the error of scoring arbitrarily and then highlighting and burnishing it into Olympic history by giving a "special award") they lost just about any legitimacy over the sport of fencing Oh, and a note to Dan: Here's another news video about the less than honest, ends justified the means type of dealings (in the pursuit of medals) in the Leninist styled athletic training that you were talking about: LINK
That video demonstrated a DISGUSTING trend. Fuck medal count leads. When countries win medals in a Leninist fashion like China and Soviet Russia, a thousand gold medals are worth less than a piece of turd. I would rather win 4th place than win tainted gold.
The commentator (Gordon Chang) got it right; this isn't a representation of Chinese culture, but rather of 'communist' culture under the PRC. In an effort to show that their political system is "better" than any in the west, they put on sham displays of prowess, using an end justifies the means approach that absolutely ignores the needs of the one. If an individual doesn't perform to perfection, then they're summarily cast aside, a replacement quickly found. Every Leninist camp trained athlete understands that he's expendable. If one genuinely compares the communist (in this case, the PRC) athletic system versus that of the west (meaning for all intents, the US), one has to also look at the numbers that they have to work with in terms of raw talent. Whilst the PRC for example, identifies and then trains potential from a very early age; the US system involves only an individual's narrow desire and dedication for a sport. Further, the US has about one quarter of the raw numbers to work with, as the PRC's population base is nearly quadruple that. So politically, it can be said that with only one quarter of the raw potential, the US can go toe to toe with China vis a vis medal counts. Of course, this 'thumb in the eye' statistic isn't lost to the Chinese Communist Party; they certainly see this as an indictment of their system. Hence, they try ever harder to produce more medal winners at any cost (to the system, the players, their own economy, et cetera), just for crowing rights or the ability to say "...if we get more medals, then that must mean that our way of governance is better than your's." Of course, in the final analysis, it's a political goal to show its own people (the Chinese) that their leadership style is more legitimate. Hence, the Olympiads are not sport or games for the PRC, but a costly political tool used purely to burnish the rule of the party. In this case, if I were an athlete in China, I would rather not even have to play this game, much less worry about which level of medal I get.
^ whutttt why is he not gonna be there..??.. im sorta addicted to watching the olympics at the mo...^^ aside from watching dressage that just sucks x_x
The undeniable truth is, man's body starts to decline with age. No matter how fit an athlete, as time goes on, performance will always be less than what it was at one's most optimum point (ie. around late teens to early twenties). Phelps is already way past his prime. Can he return and score more medals? Sure; but IMHO, his performance will be nowhere near that which he had achieved previously. Should he come back? That depends; he can go out now and be remembered as the holder of the most Big O medals or, he may return and embarrass himself if beat badly by other up and coming swimmers. That of course, may taint any potential chances for future commercialization of his past success. That is, people wouldn't want future endorsements from a Big O contender if he recently lost every meet. So returning for another contest may be a huge financial gamble for him. Like what a star of a very successful sitcom, Jerry Seinfeld did; it may be smartest to exit when one is still very much on top, rather than risk being discarded as irrelevant after people had lost interest.
Several days ago, I responded to the suspicion of possible Chinese cheating (vis a vis Ye Shiwen's amazing performance) with the following: Spoiler: Previous Response ...now there appears an article that offers a great rebuttal, or an explanation if you will, on why the win itself (despite the spectacular nature of it), wasn't anything so special (the raison d'tre for suspicion) insofar as statistics is concerned: Spoiler: Ye Shiwen - Reason Why She Won 6 August 2012 Last updated at 20:13 ET Ye Shiwen: Can statistics explain her win? By Wesley Stephenson BBC News When 16-year-old swimmer Ye Shiwen set a new world record for the 400m medley, eyebrows were raised about the margin of her victory, despite her passing all the drugs tests. But does a closer look at the figures really reveal anything unusual? There was Olympic controversy last week when Ye Shiwen, a young Chinese swimmer, won the 400m individual women's medley in fine style. Her blistering final 50m was faster than American male swimmer Ryan Lochte's final 50m in the men's event, despite him swimming one of the fastest overall times in history. John Leonard, the executive director of the American Swimming Coaches Association - but not a member of the US Olympic team - called the performance "disturbing", forcing the swimmer to deny that she had used performance-enhancing drugs. Ye Shiwen has never failed a drugs test and says the criticism is just "sour grapes". So can the various elements to her record-breaking swim be simply explained? 1. She beat her personal best by five seconds "In a short space of time the body can undergo massive changes” - Prof John Brewer Director of sport, Beds Univ Ye Shiwen is very young and still growing. She's 12cm taller than she was two years ago, when she was 14, and so you would expect her times to improve. The Australian swimming legend, Ian Thorpe, said this week that he beat his personal best by five seconds when he was a teenager. One of Ye's fellow swimmers in the 400m individual medley was Australian Stephanie Rice. Rice beat her personal best in 2008 by six seconds when she set a world record. Sport scientists say that during a teenage growth spurt, there is a release of hormones that can suddenly increase the powers of endurance. 2. She 'smashed' the world record Ye set a new world record time of four minutes 28.43 seconds, beating the previous mark by more than a second. But to take the case of Stephanie Rice, again, she beat the world record by a wider margin back in 2008. It's impressive but it's not that remarkable. 3. She swam faster than Ryan Lochte Lochte was 23 seconds faster than Ye overall. She only swam faster than him in the final stage - freestyle. The comparison with Lochte just isn't that telling. It's not the first time that Lochte has been slower than a woman over the last leg of that race. In Beijing in 2008 when he won bronze, he was slower than the Italian Alessia Fillipi - by more than half a second - and she only came fifth in her own race. Lochte simply paced himself over the race very differently to Ye Shiwen. Dr Ross Tucker from the Sports Science Institute at the University of Cape Town warns against reading too much into the comparison with Lochte. "Lochte didn't swim [the last leg] as fast as some of the other men in that same race. Ye's performance compared to the best men for that leg was maybe not that impressive," he says. Tucker points out that Rebecca Adlington swam faster than both Lochte and Ye in the final leg of the 800m freestyle at the world championships last year. "The point is," he says, "that analysing performance and trying to prove doping is a futile task." He does confirm, however, that Ye Shiwen's performance was exceptional. "At the last world championships, the top five swimmers of the 400m individual medley are doing the final 100m freestyle about 18-20% slower than the 100 freestyle world record - whereas Ye Shiwen was about 12% slower." Are there other measures we can apply? There is another measure one can look at which suggests the race was unusual. Reza Noubary, a maths professor at Bloomsbury University in Pennsylvania, has applied "threshold theory" to world records in the past. He takes the previous best performances and the amount of time that elapses between them and establishes what records are possible. He looked at the 10 best times for the 400m individual medley before Ye Shiwen beat the world record and came up with an estimate - with 90% confidence. "Based on these 10 measurements," he says, "the lower band should be 4:29.01. She did it 4:28.43. So in that sense you may call that exceptional." Ye Shiwen is extraordinary but sometimes we get extraordinary athletes. When Professor Noubary ran the data on the men's 100m track race - before Usain Bolt first broke the world record in 2009 - he said with 90% confidence that the next record wouldn't exceed 9.62 seconds. Bolt's record stands at 9.58 seconds. There is a cloud that has hung over Chinese swimming ever since 32 of their swimmers tested positive in the 1990s. And only seven months ago, another teenage swimmer tested positive for the drug EPO. But none of that means we should doubt Ye Shiwen's integrity, and there is certainly no statistical smoking gun. Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-19116749 After reading this article, I sat and honestly thought for a moment as to the whys we, as a viewing public, would seem to be almost automatically suspicious of this girl's winning performance? Do we genuinely have a reflexive western knee jerk view of China as a liar, cheat, and underhanded participant? In a word, yes. But, just as the statistics (as above) of Yi's win shows, there's a rationale behind this too. When a people becomes famous for something, those that live within that milieu are often assigned guilt by association. Take math for example; it's automatically assumed that every Asian, especially Chinese, is great in math. Of course, this isn't true, not by a long shot; Chinese just work a lot harder at it and they get better, hence out pacing a large percentage of their western peers. However, because of this skewed perception, the result is, there seems to be little academic assistance offered to Asian kids who genuinely have difficulty in mathematics; it's often assumed that regardless of their poor test scores, they, "...don't need tutoring; they're just not working hard enough, why... just look at the other Chinese kids." As an aside, it's a bit curious that westerners won't say that Asians cheat in math. But in this regard, IMHO skewed perceptions on Chinese integrity has likely clouded this girl's win. The PRC's penchant (as perceived by the west) to offer fakes, shams, or smoke and mirrors ersatz rather than real substance is rather well known. Everything from fake designer hand bags to imitation eggs can be bought and sold in China; so why not fake athletes? The final paragraph of the BBC article is telling; it states that thirty two Chinese swimmers tested positive for illicit substances in the 1990's with another as recently as seven months ago. So to the general western public, Ye's win is tempered by the knowledge that the Chinese have not only been known to cheat; but they seem to all cheat (32, after all, is a rather large number), and they've been caught at it as recently as this year. Thus, the PRC government's "win at all costs" attitude that allows cheats; their Leninist styled athletic camps; their fervent denials despite evidence in previous cases, et cetera, all predisposes maximum suspicion on any results that seemingly gives them what they want, ie. Big O gold. So, in essence, did Yi's win get marred with this 'guilt by association' probably through no fault of her own? In all likelihood, yes. But in the final analysis who can we, the viewing public (meaning both in the west AND the Chinese themselves) hold to blame for that? IMHO, the PRC government, their ways of dealing with things historically, and their overall machinations and working style, remains the biggest problem not only for their athletes, but for the Chinese people at large, never mind western opinion. ***Sidebar*** Oh, and if there's any doubt that the PRC has legions of dedicated editors working Wikipedia, just look up any famous Chinese athlete that just performed; their stats are amazingly updated on the very same day. For example, the BBC Story on Liu Xiang, a PRC track star who missed qualifying, dated 07 AUG 2012: http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/0/olympics/18902837 and then Wiki's link on him: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liu_Xiang The Wiki page already has him updated with a short curt line as follows: "He crashed out in the first round heat at London 2012, hitting the first hurdle. He hopped down the track and was helped off. He kissed the last hurdle before he left the track." So who would sit at their computer chomping at the bit, ready to update the publicly edited Wiki pages of Chinese athletes? Super dedicated fans?
Something not to be missed: Men's 3m Springboard - 07 August 2012 19:00 (six hours to go) (China's Qin Kai in pre had a low score, but sf came back to three...hope Final will be 1&2 China.) 16years old new babe of China: http://www.london2012.com/athlete/hu-yadan-1072149/
