Chinese Olympians Feel the Pressure, And Another Team Is Ready to Assist
By Liz Clarke
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, August 8, 2008
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.
Jin, a native of China, was among those retained as a consultant to the Chinese Olympic Committee. He now works with the country's Olympic women's soccer team and developed instructional compact discs on psychological strategies for coaching Chinese Olympians. Those lessons address cultural characteristics that Jin believes set Chinese athletes apart from their Western counterparts.
On the positive side, Jin said, Chinese Olympians have an excellent work ethic, tend to obey their coaches and aren't as independently minded as Western athletes. But on the negative side, their confidence isn't as high -- a result, Jin believes, of a coaching culture that is more quick to criticize than praise.
So Jin devised strategies to raise Chinese athletes' self-esteem. One such tactic is getting athletes to envision a desk with 20 legs rather than four. Each leg represents a perceived strength, such as "I'm very fast," "I'm very coordinated," "My reaction time is good," "I'm younger than my opponent," "Many people support me," and so on. With that image in mind, an athlete should feel as strong as the imaginary desk.
He also counsels athletes on blocking out negative thoughts, whether harsh words from a coach or a debilitating inner voice. "For example," Jin said, "the idea that, 'If I win I will have fame for my life. If I lose, I will bring shame to my parents, the coaches, the country.' "
Whether competing before passionate, sellout crowds in Beijing will help or hurt remains an open question.
Olympic history is rife with examples of home-court advantage. But there's a theory called the "home choke" that argues that caring "too much" about pleasing a crowd causes athletes to be over-cautious -- playing not to lose, as the cliche goes, rather than to win.
That was a concern of U.S. Olympic Committee officials prior to the 2002 Winter Games in Salt Lake City, the first Olympics after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
Recalls Kirsten Peterson, the USOC's senior sports psychologist: "There was the sense that the Olympics being on home soil was supposed to redeem our country, and there was a lot of pressure put on the athletes, who felt they had to undo some of the pain our country had felt."
As a result, USOC sports psychologists worked hard to ramp down those feelings, telling the athletes they weren't responsible for the nation's healing.
In the view of Ron Brant, national coordinator of the U.S. men's gymnastics team, the passion that will be showered on China's Olympians will be an ingredient for success or failure -- nothing in between.
"Obviously it should be to China's benefit," Brant said. "But it will depend on how well they're coached and prepared to handle the situation. Should that lack any detail and preparation, it can work against you."
Staff researcher Liu Liu contributed to this report.
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