China's Brand of Dominant Crazy Makes it America's New Great Olympic Foil

Thomas Friedman may proclaim a flat world, but in the Olympics, at least, Americans are more accustomed to a bipolar planet, oriented around themselves and one spectacular other foe. Since just about forever, that was the Soviet Union and its splinter states. After 1936, when Germany led the medal counts at the Berlin summer games, the United States or Soviet Union (including the 1992 Unified Team) was the top medal winner and/or top gold medal winner in every Summer Olympics. That was until 2008, when China won 51 golds to 36 for the United States, which wound up with enough silvers and bronzes to win the overall medal count 110 to 100. Granted, the Chinese were the host country, and they’re huge, but given that China didn’t win so much as a single summer medal until the 1984 games, that’s a hell of a bit of catch-up.

In this regard the Olympics qualify as a lagging indicator; we’ve been charting China’s geopolitical ascent for at least four decades. But just because China has a 1.3 billion people and the world’s second-largest economy doesn’t guarantee that it becomes a decent rival. (Case in point: Including its three medals so far in 2012, India and its 1.2 billion people have racked up a total of 23 summer games medals, ever.) A proper rival requires a country that geeks out on the Olympics to the degree that America does. Turns out China makes a great sparring partner in this proxy Cold War, because it not only pursues athletic excellence with a fervor, we’re increasingly learning in these games that it brings its own distinct brand of crazy.

To list but a few:

* The blazing times swum by Ye Shiwen, the 16-year-old girl whose final freestyle length in her world-record-setting 400 IM was faster than Ryan Lochte’s, triggered a round of none-too-subtle insinuation that she might be chemically enhanced. The Chinese swimming team responded that Ye has “been a genius since she was young, and her performance vindicates that.” The IOC hasn’t announced any findings of wrongdoing, so perhaps this is on its way to blowing over. But it’s also worth remembering that Chinese women swimmers were caught doping in the ’90s and as recently as March tested positive for a banned hormone. By now, either scenario is plausible: Either China’s swimming program identified and developed a certified phenom, or it identified and developed a certified phenom that it then doped up.

* The badminton match-throwing fracas that took out the women’s top-seeded pair, Wang Xiaoli and Yu Yang, must be one of the most idiotic paths to disqualification in the history of the Olympics. But the justification that Yu offered for the lackluster showing was also coolly Machiavellian: “Tomorrow it’s the knockout rounds. So we’ve already qualified, and we wanted to have more energy for the knockout rounds.” Sleepwalking through games to set up more favorable matchups for the knockout round? Don’t Americans simply call that “the last two weeks of the NBA regular season”?

* The sad resonance of diver Wu Minxia’s story after she won the gold in 3-meter springboard was a confirmation of what skeptics would’ve already assumed about China’s Olympics program: that it swallows humans and forces them to behave as robots. Her father revealed to a Shanghai newspaper that he and his wife had concealed the mother’s breast cancer from the daughter for eight years. Also, they’d not told the daughter that her grandparents had died more than a year ago. “We accepted a long time ago that she doesn’t belong entirely to us,” Wu Yuming said. “I don’t even dare to think about things like enjoying family happiness.”

Microbloggers in China freaked over Wu’s story. “Our national sports system is disgusting,” one wrote. But their national sports system also dominates the world stage. And if you’re an American fan, it’s gratifying to face such dedicated opponents. If not for American victories over the formidable Chinese, how would Americans know how other countries feel when they medal over the United States?