Column|Since the 1950s, the Chinese state has systematically produced elite athletes, but have the means recently improved?
Chinese Zhang Ziyu was playing basketball in the U18 Asian Championship and you couldn’t miss him. Zhang Ziyu was already over two meters tall in the sixth grade. Now he is 220 centimeters tall.
There is one player taller than him in the men’s NBA.
Zhang was selected as the most valuable player of the tournament. He averaged 35 points and 12.8 rebounds per game.
Here we have a new one Yao Ming, the international sports media raved. I personally hope not.
Yao Ming is a Chinese basketball player. Today he is 43 years old and retired, but in the early 2000s he was China’s first NBA-level star player – and the product of Chinese state ambition. The country needed sports heroes.
The authorities had been watching suitable families for a couple of generations. Yao Ming’s grandfather was once known as one of the tallest men in Shanghai. The grandfather couldn’t get to the training in time, but his son was picked up to join the sports program. The boy grew up to be a tall man and a basketball player.
The genes were so good that they didn’t want to waste them.
So in Shanghai, the authorities and coaches strongly guided the boy to start a family with the then captain of the Chinese women’s national basketball team. The plan succeeded. In 1980, the 58-centimeter Yao Ming was born.
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Yao Ming finally stretched to 229 centimeters.
The boy’s qualities were optimal for a basketball player, the sports authorities measured early on. Yao Ming was already over 170 centimeters tall at the age of eight. Despite his parents’ opposition, he was accepted into the athlete development program, even though the boy hated hard training. According to the claims, he ate “food developed by scientists” to support height growth.
Yao Ming finally stretched to 229 centimeters, and the basket size was amazing.
in China Since the 1950s, children with athletic talent have been selected for top coaching. I myself have visited the boarding school for Olympic hopefuls in Zhejiang. There, the little children trained professionally, and their characteristics were monitored down to bone density.
Sports schools are no longer popping up in China like they used to. Parents want their children to focus on school, and few want their six-year-old to train professionally every day.
Modern China has indeed developed new ways. According to state media, young talents are currently supported with a “star program”, where they are coached not only in the sport, but also in terms of nutrition, mental health and physiotherapy. Many can live at home.
Times change, I thought.
Then I read that both of Zhang Ziyu’s parents are national team basketball players.
The writer is the foreman of HS correspondents.
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