From ESPN:
Select Chinese national athletes of past and present are profiled in this article leading up to the summer Olympic Games. Read the personal stories of the Chinese athletes, like national diving champions, Guo Jingjing and Tian Liang.
The hallway outside the conference room reeks of cigarette smoke. At one end, the clock Guo walked by keeps ticking, ticking, ticking. In an office at the opposite end is the puppeteer: Zhou Jihong, diving gold medalist in 1984, now director of China’s dominant and beloved diving team. Her fingernails are total junior high cheerleader, bright purple and sparkly, but her reputation makes them seem vaguely taunting, like a Santa hat on a gunman. They call her the Iron Lady. She plots out lives: when to train, where to go, what to think, who to like, why to care. Her power comes with a price: She can see the future.
She understands what that clock really means. It’s not just counting down the days until the beginning of the Olympics, it’s also counting down the days until the end of the Soviet-style Chinese sports system that has been her life. For more than a decade, the Sports Bureau has been fighting extinction, losing a thousand tiny battles but not yet losing the war. Exhibit A: Zhou’s reaction to Tian and Guo. Both were banned by the national team after the Athens Olympics for excessive commercial activities. They’d been in front of every camera, working on private endorsement deals. Both realized their mistake. Tian said he made a self-criticism, the Communist tool of humiliation and control through which people are forced to confess crimes real or imagined. Zhou said Tian did not. She said Guo did make such a self-criticism and earned her place back. Guo said she did not. There is much confusion. But Guo is here, and Tian is not. She was controllable, and he was not. Zhou’s job is to control, to hold things together long enough to win a bunch of medals, one more time, with feeling.
The future is uncertain, and the clock reminds them it is also unstoppable. At the top of the stairs, just down the hall, the minutes and hours and days slide away, one after another. It’s the first thing the coaches face every morning, a countdown to upheaval.“I don’t look at the clock,” Zhou says.
