China’s Over-Training

Will China overtake the United States in the Olympic medal race? Some crystal ball gazers think so but China’s drive for Olympic dominance might be stalled by over-training.

From AFP:

When Frenchman Christian Bauer saw the Chinese fencing team he was hired to train for the Olympics the first thing he did was to send them all home.

“They were washed out through over-training and every one of them was carrying an injury,” he said. “So I gave them a vacation.”

The move upset Chinese sports officials who summoned Bauer for a dressing down. After that, they watched his every move in the training gym under a banner that reads “Love your pain”.

Only when Bauer’s fencers swept all before them at the Asian Games in Doha in December 2006 was he left alone to train the team as he wished.

You can read the rest of the article here but here are paragraphs worth highlighting:

Over-training is blamed for the relatively short career span of some of China’s great athletes.

China’s best ever women’s table tennis player, Deng Yaping, retired at the relatively young age of 24, saying later that she had worked through 19 years of injuries since starting to play at the age of five.

Former Chinese marathon champion Ai Dongmei sued her coach last year, accusing him of adopting inhumane training methods that left her with deformed feet and a virtual cripple.

China’s women’s basketball team of the early 1990s disappeared almost without trace after winning silver medals in the 1992 Olympics and 1994 world championships.

A similar fate awaited the women’s volleyball team that won the Athens gold medal.

“Great teams should last a dozen years or so, not four. Look at any other great team. They have longevity. But not Chinese teams,” said Maher.

Old habits are changing, however. China is more exposed than ever to foreign influences in sport, with more than 50 overseas coaches like Maher and Bauer in charge of training Olympic athletes.

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