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BEIJING: 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.
Bauer’s situation illustrates concerns among
some top officials that over training by Chinese coaches may be
doing more harm than good to China’s Olympic medal hopes at the
August 8 to 24 Games.
The sports ministry has gone so far as to urge
coaches to sign contracts that commit them not to push their
athletes too far.
And the chief medical officer of the China
Olympic Committee, Li Guoping, recently acknowledged in an interview
with AFP that some coaches lacked an understanding of the basic
science behind training.
Tom Maher, the Australian coach of China’s
women’s basketball team, said that the Chinese work far harder
than any other athletes he had ever seen.
“The logic here is: if two hours training is
good, four must be better. If you can do eight hours, then 12 is
better still,” said Maher, who was appointed in 2005.
He said that he had to put an end to training
practices that were damaging his players.
“Going on 10,000-m training runs doesn’t
make you a better basketball player, probably the opposite,” he
said.
Because they are forced from age seven, when
they are recruited by sports schools, to engage in long distance
running, many players are physically ruined for basketball when very
young, he said.
“I have players in their early 20s whose knees
are gone. They are bone on bone from over-use,” he said. “This
is a sport for jumping and you can’t do that with knees like
that.”
Foreign coaches and athletes first began to take
notice of China’s coaching regimen in the early 1990s when Ma
Junren and his women distance runners began to rewrite the world
record books.
Ma is best remembered for leading his young
runners on brutal marathon-a-day high-altitude training sessions in
the Tibetan foothills.
Those training methods live on today in the
shape of runners like Zhou Chunxiu, 29, probably China’s strongest
gold medal hope in track and field at the Beijing Games after Liu
Xiang, the men’s 110m hurdles champion.
Zhou won the London marathon last year after
enduring a marathon-a-day training routine. But she was hampered by
an injury to her ankle at the Osaka world championships last year
and finished second.
Following her London win, Zhou’s coach Liang
Songli defended his training methods.
Overtraining is blamed for the relatively short
career span of some of China’s great athletes.
China’s best 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.
Li, the Olympic doctor, said that Chinese
coaches were beginning to learn that smarter training, rather than
more of it, could improve performance.
“More training doesn’t necessarily mean
better results while training less doesn’t mean worse,” he said.
-- AFP
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