Helping Athletes When Great Expectations Grate

Chinese Olympians Feel the Pressure, And Another Team Is Ready to Assist

BEIJING, Aug. 8 -- There will be no empty seats and no hushed voices at Beijing National Stadium when the Olympic caldron is lit Friday, signaling the opening of the 2008 Games.

The country's fiercely proud hosts have been schooled for months in China's official Olympic cheer: "Go Olympics! Go China!" And the chant is sure to ring out at the iconic Bird's Nest, and every other venue over the next 17 days, in an effort to spur Chinese athletes to a record gold medal haul.

With the nation's population 1.3 billion, logic suggests that China's Olympic fervor will translate to the greatest home-field advantage in the history of sports. But it's also possible that the country's gold medal expectations, which have been building since the Games were awarded to Beijing in 2001, will prove a smothering psychological burden.

To ensure China's highly skilled Olympians do their best during the most important performance of their lives, Chinese officials have borrowed a page from the United States' Olympic playbook and retained the services of as many as 20 sports psychologists, roughly one for each team.

"Our government has been unprecedented in supporting the Olympians' psychological counseling, both orally and financially," said Zhang Liwei, a sports psychology professor at Beijing Sport University and full-time psychology counselor for China's 2008 Olympic rhythmic gymnastics and tennis teams.

Zhang said he strongly believes that competing in Beijing will be a great advantage, citing statistics that suggest Olympic hosts have a 40 percent greater chance of winning medals than non-hosts. Other studies have quantified the home-court effect at seven additional medals for the host country.

But Zhang concedes there are disadvantages, such as "overrated social expectations." To combat that, Zhang said he is prescribing positive reinforcement to his athletes.

"For example, I order them to say positive things every morning when they awake and every night before they fall asleep," he explains. " 'Tomorrow is another day' or 'I can call my mother again tomorrow" are the ones I often use."

China's athletes are hardly the first to feel performance-related pressure. But the burden is exponentially greater at the Beijing Games, where China's 639 Olympians are expected to validate their country's emergence as a sporting power and global force through their performance on the field. In the eyes of Communist Party officials and many Chinese people, winning the most gold medals will affirm the vigor, wisdom and supremacy of China itself.

"To win more medals is a showcase of a powerful nation," explains Xu Pei, a professor of sports psychology at the Wuhan Institute of Physical Education in Wuhan province. "It represents the state of Chinese people: That Chinese people are not [so-called] 'sick Asian men' anymore. It boosts a sense of national pride."

Not forgotten by many Chinese sports enthusiasts is the performance of China's male gymnasts at the 2004 Olympics, when many of them appeared to choke under the pressure. The men were the reigning world champions entering the Athens Games, but they finished fifth after one slipped on the parallel bars, another fell from the high bar and two stepped out of bounds on the floor exercise.

According to Jin Wang, a professor of sport psychology at Kennesaw State University outside Atlanta, that dreadful showing persuaded Chinese authorities to invest in intensive psychological training.