Tag Archives: Olympics

Pressure builds on China as problems circle Rio Olympics

China’s largest ever Olympic contingent of 411 athletes has brought expectations for a sizeable medal haul to Brazil. But with with local issues compounded by some wider – and more worrying – trends, it is no exaggeration to say that the Rio Olympics are facing potentially fatal headwinds.

The Rio Olympics are shaping up to be the most pivotal of recent times.

Not because the sporting action is any more anticipated than at previous Games – far from it – but because the Olympic concept has taken so many knocks in recent years that the very credibility of the Games is under threat.

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Long road to NBA for Chinese duo

Zhou Qi and Wang Zhelin become first Chinese players drafted for nine years, but both face an uphill battle to play in the NBA.

A year ago, ice hockey player Song Andong was touted as China’s next big sporting star after being drafted by the NHL’s New York Islanders, then swiftly promoted as one of the faces of China’s 2022 Winter Olympic Games bid campaign. This spring, it is the turn of two Chinese basketball players, Zhou Qi and Wang Zhelin, who were drafted by the NBA’s Houston Rockets and Memphis Grizzlies, respectively.

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10 sporting questions for the Year of the Monkey

After a breathless few weeks during which the entire sporting world has been talking about Chinese football (with yours truly quoted by AFP three timesFT twice, El Pais, Hicimos, Vice Sports and interviewed by CCTVBBC and Al Jazeera among others), let’s take a look at a few stories that could be cropping up over the next 12 months…

funky-monkey-soccer

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Did China really ban golf or not?

Headlines last week left readers with little doubt about the state of golf in China:

Pretty clear, right? Well, actually, no. As this article from shougolf.com points out [in Chinese], it turns out that the Washington Post and the BBC (its two main targets) and others jumped the gun somewhat on their “China bans golf/golf club memberships” headlines.

Picture courtesy of CNN
Picture courtesy of CNN

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Beijing vs Almaty: The Final Countdown

In a few hours’ time, IOC President Thomas Bach will announce either China’s capital, Beijing, or Kazakhstan’s largest city, Almaty, as the host of the 2022 Winter Olympic Games. Here are some reasons why China should be confident of success – and some reasons to worry:

Beijing 2022
Why Beijing will win
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Why Beijing Will Win the 2022 Olympics – and Why It Shouldn’t

All the talk in this part of the world is how China is bound to win the 2022 Olympics, given that its only rival in this two-horse race is so nondescript that many haven’t even heard of it, let alone be able to place it on a map (for the record, Almaty is in Kazakhstan, only a few hundred miles from the Chinese border).

But there is one very obvious hurdle here: this is a Winter Games, and while Almaty was described in the IOC’s evaluation commission report (ECR) as “a winter sports city, with easy access to the mountains and some world-class winter sports venues”, check out pictures from the same ECR of where China’s bid plans to hold the skiing event:

Skiing courses

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Nanjing Youth Olympics: worth the fuss?

With the Nanjing Youth Olympic Games (YOG) drawing to a close earlier this week after receiving little to none global attention, the few people who were watching have been debating the merits of the spectacle. In general, those who were there appear to have been won over by the Chinese penchant for ‘Bigger is Better’, while those who weren’t were more than happy to pile on.

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Weekly Wrap: Xi Jinping, Tour de France, Wimbledon, football $$

The glut of “China isn’t at the World Cup, but…” articles has slowed (there is only so much to say, after all), though these pictures of President Xi Jinping are doing the rounds (h/t @niubi), unthinkable to depict the President in cartoon form just a few years ago.

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