China in Olympic in the past. This just highlight the struggles us Chinese have been through to saviour the success today. Which that much sweeter against all the odds.
Current Situation: Not too great for China to stay on top.
OK so China has 38 golds to America's 36. Really, America has 37 because it would be beyond an act of God for the US to lose to Japan in basketball. The US bus could crash and all of them could run the rest of the way bleeding with concussions and still beat Japan like they were playing a mild warm up. Without that, there is only a 1 gold medal difference and the US has women's volleyball vs Brazil (50/50 chance), and 2 boxing matches (1 against an Uzbek who KO'd this same American opponent the last time they fought) and 1 against a Cuban. China has 1 boxing match but I have no hopes for it. We'll just say that the US needs to choke on all 3 for China to win and if they get one, they will tie and win by silver count.
Combat Sports: Room for cheap and fast improvement.
One incredibly frustrating thing I noticed is the poor performance of Chinese combat sports. Whether it be Taekwondo, wrestling, boxing, karate, etc... we have lost every single final without fail. And it is NOT because of lack of skill. They virtually all lost on one common mistake: lack of aggression. In a fight, you always want to put forward pressure on your opponent to overload his training, force him to drop offense and go into defense, then break down his defense. This is all done by overwhelming offense; nobody can ever win by defense because the best outcome for defense is 0-0. Chinese "fighters" are 90% defense, 10% offense; they are trained under the philsophy to firstly ensure one's own protection and securing that, think of ways to eek out points. When they fight, I can tell they are afraid to make moves because they fear that the wrong move will get them scored on causing them to lose a gold medal and in the end, they lose that medal because the opponent's aggression broke down their defense, or even when the defense held up to a 0-0, the judges decided a Chinese defeat due to lack of offense. And when they are in the lead, they dig further into defense because they just want to hold on and have the time run out, causing their opponents to have the oppertunity to go on the offense for points. This is what happened to the Chinese 53kg wrestler who lost to Japan blowing a 4-0 early lead. In London, I remember a Chinese Taekwondo male heavyweight lost his bout on penalty because the fucker was ahead on points with a few second left and literally turned around and ran out of bounds hoping to win by clock. That is exactly the wrong mentality to get into a fight with, and it is supposed to be a fight but they forgot. This is simulated combat by points but the Chinese treat this like it's a touch point game. Two mental points that make a person a good fighter are aggression and fearlessness. Mike Tyson once said, "If I don't kill you, it don't count." That's aggression. As long as your opponent is standing, no matter what the points are, no matter what the clock says, you should be attacking and laying on costant pressure. 'This person has wronged me; this is my chance to hurt him for it.' That's what a fighter should be thinking during the entire match. The second point is fearlessness. A Korean saying in Taekwondo goes, "If you want to kill a tiger, you must expect to be bitten." When a person enters a fight thinking that the primary goal is to avoid being hit, he will end up doing no damage against his opponent, but slowly taking more and more damage with each small defensive mistake until he has taken all of the damage and his opponent has none. A person must enter the fight with the mentality that the primary goal is to unload as much damage as possible onto the opponent with preventing shots on oneself being a bonus. In that way, he may take damage faster than if he had been on full defense, but he stands a chance of destroying his opponent completely and winning, hence stopping more damage to himself in the long run. He may also completely overwhelm his opponent into defense and win without damage. The best defense is a good offense. Take-away point: Self-defense is a misnomer; attack, attack, attack. At the end of a good match, your opponent shouldn't even be thinking about points or medals; he should just be relieved that he survived the beating... if he's still conscious. I don't know how I can get this through to the Chinese coaches but I don't have hopes for the boxing final tomorrow.
Further Improvement: Can be done but maybe should not be done.
That was an immediate and cost-free way for China to improve. We had lost every final combat bout out of several; had we taken just 2, the gold medal count would be pretty much out of reach for the Americans. But there are other ways to improve that I'm not so sure should be undertaken. Or rather, I think should not be undertaken. Swimming medals are very possible for China to emphasize and unlike some athletics events, we are given constant reminder that Chinese genetics are indeed built to swim competitively. However, swimming is a rich people sport and it would require drawing talent from middle class urban families. This is both difficult to do and possibly should not be done. In order to do this, the culture towards sports in China has to change. Culturally, Chinese people pity those who earn a living with their body as opposed to with their mind. The general consensus in China is to focus as much on academics as possible while exercising just enough to remain healthy... which is important if you want to pull long study hours. So there are 2 problems right there for Olympic glory: 1, in order to draw city talent, you need to create a culture of life balance rather than with nearly all emphasis on academics so that kids can play sports enough to be recognized as an early talent to even think about recruiting. This takes time from his studies. If a kid swims once a month, his talent will simply not be visible to recruiters. 2. You need to remove the stigma that it is a shame to earn a living with your body. When I was a child, I once remarked how cool it was to be a UFC fighter and win matches and my father responded that he pities those people who allow thier own bodies to be injured and destroyed for other's amusement. My girlfriend just yesterday told me that if a talent recruiter came to tell her that her child shows incredible athletic promise and he would like to recruit him, her answer would be, "No, no, hell no, fuck no. If you ever come back, I'll set you on fire in broad daylight and just accept the legal consequences. Stay away from my child!" She says that an Olympic gold medalist in China works his entire young life away for a 1% chance at 2 minutes of fame. You need to be Liu Xiang or Guo Jingjing to really make any money. If not, you'll most likely end up gifted a moderate apartment and hold a medium income job as a coach. She says why would you want that? She can almost guarantee much better than that if she just studies. And athletes only get that if they make it to the 1% of gold medalists and succeed. If not, there is a high chance that they will end up in a low-key type of poverty. So as you see, in order to change the culture so that more inner city youths are recruited as swimming talents, the focus would have to be made more on personal balance rather on academic elitism. And the problem with that is that the Olympic games are, as the title denotes, just games. The real competition is in technology. By taking emphasis away from academics, it can cause China's tech drive to bleed some energy and that's not worth it, therefore I don't think this second measure should be taken. However, I think that with time, this will happen eventually. China is fervently trying to make up as much ground as possible to overtake the US. Once this is done and the US is behind, China's massive population can maintain the lead on cruise control, and then, the culture will naturally drift away from academic perfection at all costs and towards life balance, which includes sports and pursuit of physical excellence.
Why the Chinese ladies rock!
On question I'd like to address is why Chinese women get so many more medals than Chinese men. It's because Chinese athletes are almost all picked from poor rural families and those families are more willing to give up daughters than sons so the talent selection pool is higher for women than for men. This effect is compounded by the fact that in rival countries that recruit based on natural affinity to the sport like in the West, men are more likely to take to serious physical training than women.
Say it like it is, no sugar coating.
Lastly, I know many people say that we should be elated to have made so much progress from that disaster that was the 2016 Rio Games where we finished behind the UK, but I don't see it that way. We won 38 gold medals in 2012 London, and I see this as 0 progress in 9 years. But performances vary for every athlete day to day so no need to be gloom.
I think the posts from both of you can go hand in hand and complement each other. Olympic Games is a sports game sure, both it also reflects the national strength and character. The performance and achievements in Olympic Games correlate quite strongly with those national qualities. The history of Chinese participation in the Olympic Games resonates strongly with the evolution/revolution of the development of the Chinese state. It will also serve as some proxy indicators of future development of Chinese state.
