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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