Will Yao Ming be ready in time?

China’s star basketball player, Yao Ming, is worried that, with only 42 days left until the opening ceremony, he will not have enough time to tune up.

Yao has yet to fully recover from the surgery he underwent in March to repair his injured left foot. Still, the Houston Rockets all-star center will start training with the national team today, less than two days after he arrived in Beijing.

 

 “I have no time to take a break or to recover from the jet lag,” Yao said. “I will start training with the national team tomorrow. It feels great to be home again.”

China Daily.

China Crazy for Gold

China is one of the few countries in the world with academies dedicated to what many consider a rec-room pastime—like the Luneng Table-Tennis School, with 80 tables.

A year ago, a slender girl called Cloud had no idea she would dedicate her life to lifting disks of iron above her head. Then a stranger came to her remote village in eastern China’s Shandong province, took detailed measurements of her shoulder width, thigh length and waist circumference — and announced she would have the honor of serving her motherland as a weight lifter. The then 14-year-old daughter of vegetable farmers had little choice in the matter. She had been chosen to be a cog in China’s vast sports machine, a multibillion-dollar apparatus designed with one primary goal in mind: churning out Olympic gold medalists.

Today Chen Yun (yun means cloud) trains at the Weifang City Sports School, one of 3,000 state-run athletics academies that consign nearly 400,000 youngsters to a form of athletic servitude. Sitting under the watchful eyes of her coach and a man who identifies himself as the school’s “propaganda director,” Cloud tells me that weight-lifting is her favorite sport. Any hobbies? I ask. “Weight-lifting,” she answers. Anything Cloud likes besides weight-lifting? “Weight-lifting,” she repeats…

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