In China’s Medal Factory, Winners Cannot Quit

FENGCHENG, China — As a reward for winning an Olympic gold medal in flatwater canoeing four years ago, Yang Wenjun — the son of peasant rice farmers — was handed the deed to a three-bedroom apartment here in a neighborhood called Sunny City.
The local government bought and decorated it, hanging giant scrolls in the living room that announce in Mandarin: “Yang Wenjun won gold in the Olympics. It brings good luck here.” But his mother, Nie Chunhua, said Yang had been anything but lucky. She wiped away tears with hands dark and swollen from farming.

“If I had better economic condition, I would not like him to do sports,” Nie, 49, said this spring. “Every time I think about him training, I feel so sad that my heart hurts. For him, and for me, there is so much pain.”

Yang, one of China’s most successful water sports athletes, has never lived in his apartment. He has not seen his parents in three years. At 24, he lives 250 miles away at his sport’s training center, where he is preparing for the Beijing Olympics.

Yang said he could not stand his life.

For nearly a decade, he has tried to quit canoeing, he told The New York Times during an interview at the training center. He said he would rather attend college or start a business, but acknowledged that he was ill-equipped to do either one.

Many Chinese sports schools, in which more than 250,000 children are enrolled, focus on training at the expense of education. Critics, like the former Olympic diving coach Yu Fen, are calling for changes. They say athletes are unprepared to leave the sports system that has raised them.

“I do not want to work as an athlete, but as an athlete here I have no freedom to choose my future,” Yang said, speaking through the team’s official interpreter. “As a child, I didn’t learn anything but sport, and now what do I do? I can’t do anything else. I have my own dreams, but it is very difficult. I don’t have the foundation to make them come true.”

Officials refused to let Yang retire, even after he won Olympic gold in the C-2 500-meter race with Meng Guanliang at the Athens Games in 2004. He described how they had threatened to withhold his retirement payment if he did not compete through the Beijing Games.
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Government studies have shown that retired athletes — even former champions — often have trouble making ends meet. Ai Dongmei, a former Beijing Marathon champion, sold popcorn and clothing on the street. Zou Chunlan, a former national champion weight lifter, scrubbed backs in a bathhouse; she said a coach had given her steroids that produced side effects like facial hair and a deep voice. The All China Women’s Federation later helped her open a laundry.
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Cui Dalin, the vice minister of the General Administration of Sport of China, said the government had begun to pay attention to the plight of the retired athlete.

“We will train them to have more skills, so that after the retirement from their sports career they can go to society and find a job easily,” Cui said in an interview at the Chinese Olympic Committee in Beijing.

But changing the status quo will take time. Ma Pengpeng, 17, a provincial rower from Handan City, quit her city team in 2006 but was too far behind her peers to attend a regular school.

At her city sports school, she said: “They don’t really care about books. Their goal is to win gold medals.”

Ma enrolled in a technical school to become a machinist. But her father, a coal miner, ordered her back to the rowing team, saying it was her best chance for a good life.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/21/sports/olympics/21athlete.html?_r=1&ref=sports&oref=slogin