what it takes
an exploration into one of my roman empires
I’ve consistently followed diving over the last couple summer olympics, even though I I know almost nothing about the sport, because pretty dive nice to look at. All I know is that little splash = better dive, because that’s what my parents used to point out. What they do while in the air is none of my business. How can pointed toes, tight curls, straight knees amount to the technical prowess of little splash?
But another reason why I watch diving is because China dominates in this event, and watching Chinese Olympians win scratches the little nationalist itch in my head. This year, China swept all eight gold medals across all the diving events.
That brings me to the question of why Chinese people are so good at diving. I often like to go down the rabbithole of studying athletes’ upbringings. I want to know if they’re nepo babies and who their idol was growing up and how they got into their sport. It’s so intriguing to me: what does it take it be the absolute best in the world?
If you knew nothing about Chinese athletes, you may suspect that the best divers in the world are Chinese, because Chinese people have a unique body composition where their bones are so light that they remain in the air a split second longer than their big-boned counterparts, allowing them to complete that extra somersault or maybe diving in China gets as much hype as football does in America, like they have a diving Superbowl, neither of which are really accurate. So, why does China have the best divers in the world?
the context
China cares a lot about the Olympics; all countries do to a certain extent because nationalism, patriotism, and the works, but the push to stand atop of the medal count podium is a more recent strategy that China has adopted as push toward revitalizing their global image. People like to downplay China’s high medal counts, because oh, China has 1.4 billion people, of course a couple of them are going to turn out to be Olympians, but that logic doesn’t exactly make sense because there’s other countries with giant populations who aren’t churning out gold medalists. The comparison they try and make is analogous to the infinite monkey theorem that states if you had infinite monkeys typing on typewriters, at some point, they will churn out the complete works of William Shakespeare, but 1.4 billion people is far from infinite people, and Olympians don’t just pop out, because the population size and statistics says they will. All that to say that China’s injects a shit ton of investment into certain sports.
the history
For context for the people who learned nothing in World Civ like I did, China has a long-ass history of ~5,000 years. My parents scoffed at the idea that there was such a things a AP US History, because the U.S. is what, almost 250 years old, how the fuck did they stretch a relative blip in history to a year-long course? And our class still didn’t fully learn about the last hundred years of American history, which explains why I know so little about the world wars.
Anyways, as would naturally happen, when you have 5,000 years of history, you have waves of good times and bad times, but generally, you establish a pretty robust civilization that has a solid footing on the world stage. And that was what China was for a long time. They were a country that innovated. They created gunpowder, paper, the compass, silk, the Great Wall, etc. And then it all fell apart.
After the Opium Wars, the fragmentation of the Qing dynasty, and the rise of foreign powers, China fell into what is known as the Century of Humiliation, which is exactly what it sounds like. They lost a bunch of wars, got fucked over in a bunch of treaties, the people were starving, there was no stable government; China was fucked for a while.
And it was really embarrassing for them, because for centuries, they had been known as a world power, and then opium happened. I’ve simplified it down a bunch, but you get it.
China finally got it together in the last couple decades by playing the game of capitalism, and the money-making machine that you see today was born.
sports
China knows it’ll never be competitive in some sports. Like the national Chinese basketball team is never going to stand up to Lebrahbrah James, and the soccer team has no chance against Brazil. But diving? They can go against the world in diving, because let’s be honest, who obsessively watches diving in their free time?
In the US, the path to elite sports is less about talent and hard work and more about how much money you can fling towards training. This is not to discount the time and effort it takes to get to an elite level, but at the end of the day, sports are expensive. Of course, there are exceptions to the rule but the working class tends not to have the excess income and time to dedicate to sports.
It’s pretty much the complete opposite in China, where children are often selected at a very young age to attend specialized training schools. Scouts test their athletic potential and decide if they are athlete material and if so, which sport they should train for. These kids are often from rural villages, where their prospects of elite education and career are limited. The hope of becoming an elite athlete then becomes one of the more promising paths.
During the Tokyo 2020 Olympics, I remember being absolutely mesmerized by Quan Hongchan’s dives. She was only fourteen at the time, but in the individual 10m platform dive, she earned tens across the board on two of her dives; one perfect dive is virtually unheard of, two is practically impossible. The Chinese coined her technique as the 水花消失术 (water splash disappearance technique, very creative I know).
Later when I dug into her background, I found out that Quan is from a poor farming village in rural China, and her mother had been in a pretty terrible car accident a couples years before that requires consistent medical treatment. At a young age, she became the main breadwinner of her family. Every one of her dives was weighted with the pressure that she had to cover her mother’s medical treatments.
A part of me relishes a zero-to-hero or rags-to-riches story. I’m just a feeble-minded person, who eats up the story that billionaire America feeds me, this idea that you can become something from nothing, when the case is that billionaires had something to begin with but that’s a digression. I love to see someone that comes from nothing win, but my love for these types of stories contradicts with the fact that I believe healthcare is a human right, and especially if you’re training as hard as Chinese divers do, you shouldn’t have to worry about medaling to support your family, but alas, people think you need to earn the right to live.
Watching her in the 2024 Paris Olympics no longer felt as light-hearted and fun. She crushed the competition as usual, but I couldn’t help but imagine how stressful it must feel to have the weight of your mother’s life, your family, and the pride of your country resting on your shoulders. I don’t know, I’m pretty terrible at handling stress so it stresses me out to see other people stressed.
So, in the end, what makes someone the absolute best at what they do? I guess the answer is that sometimes, they just have to be.