Fu Yuanhui Teaches China to Relax at the Olympics

It’s difficult to discuss China’s Olympic history without stumbling over（结结巴巴地说） politics and propaganda. The swimmer Fu Yuanhui may help change that.

By official count, there are twenty-eight sports, three hundred and six events, and twenty-four hundred and eighty-eight available medals（奖牌） at this year’s Rio Olympics. The more than eleven thousand participating athletes represent two hundred and six countries, which duke it out（打架，一决雌雄） over sixteen days in a ritualized（仪式化的，程式化的） display of prowess（英勇，勇猛） that is as pricey as it is purposeless. There’s pro-forma（预估的） talk of sportsmanship（运动员精神） and international coöperation, but even the opening ceremony’s Parade of Nations lays bare（暴露，公开） the tribalism（部落文化，部落制度） in us all: what counts here is the flag and the flash of gold. For the Chinese government, which in recent years has made no secret of its desire to promote China’s supremacy on the world’s most conspicuous（显著的，显而易见的） athletic stage, the Olympics are closer to a gladiatorial（[,glædɪə'torɪəl]角斗的） contest（竞赛） than a sporting event. The task is to bring the motherland glory, and glory comes exclusively（唯一的，专有的） in one color.

It’s difficult to discuss China’s Olympic tradition without stumbling over politics and propaganda. When the first modern Games were launched, in Athens, a hundred and twenty years ago, the Chinese—enfeebled（衰弱的） on the inside by an impotent government and threatened at their borders by Western powers—feared for the extinction of their millennia-old empire. They didn’t begin participating in the Olympics until 1932, under the flag of the Republic of China（中华民国）, and they won not a single gold. Shortly after the Communist revolution, they went on a twenty-four-year hiatus（[haɪ'eɪtəs]裂隙，缝隙）. In the meantime, in 1959, a table-tennis player named Rong Guotuan became the country’s first world champion in any sport. Mao Zedong praised the victory as a “spiritual nuclear weapon,” perhaps signalling（发出信号） the privileged position that sports would come to occupy. Zhang Boling, an early advocate（倡导者，支持者） of the Olympics, proclaimed as early as 1909 that “a great nation must first strengthen the race; a great race must first strengthen the body.” When China reëntered the Games, in 1984, its athletes won fifteen gold medals. According to Zheng Wang, who authored the book “Never Forget National Humiliation,” which devotes a chapter to the politics of the Olympics, gold medals have since become the “currency of the Communist Party’s legitimacy（[lɪ'dʒɪtɪməsɪ]合法，合理，正统）” and a concrete marker of China’s position in the global hierarchy.

China’s sudden gold-medal success was due in large part to the establishment, in the nineteen-eighties, of state-run sports schools. Scouts began plucking（采，把……从困境中拖出来） promising young athletes from their homes and immersing（浸泡） them in intensive, isolationist training. Eight- and nine-year-olds sacrificed a traditional education for incubation（ [ɪŋkjʊ'beɪʃ(ə)n]孵化，孵蛋） in a system in which the odds（机会，可能性） of being chosen to participate in something as high-stakes as the Olympics were—and remain—woefully（悲伤地，不幸地） slim. In 2008, three thousand professional athletes trained full-time for the Beijing Olympics; a fifth actually made it to the Games. And even reaching the lower tiers of the podium（领奖台，乐队指挥台） is hardly cause for celebration. The motto（座右铭） might as well be “Go gold or go home.” First-place winners—like Liu Xiang, who became the country’s first gold medallist in men’s track and field（田径比赛）, at the 2004 Athens Games—are anointed（[ə'nɒɪnt]涂油，使神圣化） as national heroes overnight, and can expect to bask in（沐浴在） fame and fortune for the foreseeable future. Those who do not win gold are regarded as disappointments. To make matters worse, most lack the skills or resources to begin life as non-athletes.

With such pressure to succeed, it is not surprising that some Chinese competitors take grave risks to win. Earlier this year, Wang Junxia, who won gold and silver in distance running（长跑） at the 1996 Atlanta Games, admitted to having been part of a Chinese state-sponsored doping（使用兴奋剂） regime（政体）. (The International Association of Athletics Federations is currently investigating the claim.) Between 1990 and 1998, twenty-eight Chinese swimmers tested positive for performance-enhancing drugs, causing the kind of public scandal that has cast a dark and enduring（持久的） shadow on the team. Indeed, the ongoing feud this year between the twenty-four-year-old Chinese swimmer Sun Yang and his Australian rival, Mack Horton—in which Horton accused Sun of being a “drug cheat” after Sun suffered a three-month ban, in 2014—plays on these persistent（持久的，坚持的） feelings of Chinese humiliation and indignation（愤怒，分开）, the sense that China is being mocked as a nation for decades of deficiency.

But at the Rio Games a different narrative has also emerged. Although the spotlight on Chinese athletes began with doping, it eventually landed on Fu Yuanhui, a twenty-year-old swimmer with the facial expressiveness and vibrant personality of a Pokémon. (The word “adorkable” comes to mind.) On August 8th, Fu finished third in the final of the women’s hundred-metre backstroke（仰泳）, finding out from a reporter after the race that she had won bronze. She doubled over in joy. “Whoa, I was so fast!” she said. “I’m very, very satisfied with my result!” Fu proceeded to tell the reporter that she’d used up all her “mystical powers洪荒之力” to achieve the result. When asked whether she had high hopes for her next race, the women’s four-by-one-hundred-metre medley relay混合接力泳, Fu blithely（ ['blaiðli]快活地，无忧无虑地） assured the reporter that she had “absolutely no expectations.” Now, contrast this reaction with Sun’s tearful breakdown, two days earlier, upon learning that he had placed second in the men’s four-hundred-metre freestyle, after losing to Horton by thirteen hundredths of a second. Some of Sun’s anguish must have been personal, since he had been defending his gold-medal title from the 2012 Olympics, but some was on behalf of his compatriots（[kəm'pætrɪət;同胞）. That 2012 gold was China’s first in men’s swimming, and Sun lost it.

Fu was born in 1996 and grew up in the early aughts（anything）, when China had already made great strides（突飞猛进） in economic reform and swung its doors open to the outside world. The same year that Fu swam in her first Olympics, in London, Hu Jintao, who was then the general secretary of the Communist Party, delivered a speech exhorting his fellow-citizens to promote China’s “soft power”—power that would presumably（大概，推测起来） include impressive medal hauls（金牌总数）. But Fu’s generation, bred on the same social-media outlets that now unreservedly embrace her idiosyncrasies（[,ɪdɪə(ʊ)'sɪŋkrəsɪ]个性）, has awarded the young star something better than a gold medal. “She looks like she’s having so much fun!” a commentator from Beijing wrote, having watched Fu on the state television broadcast. “When’s the last time we saw that on CCTV from a Chinese athlete?” In the past, fun had seemed like a selfish pursuit, the unpatriotic（不爱国的） trivialization（平凡化，轻视） of a nation’s striving. But Fu’s unexpected fame introduced new vocabulary into the conversation and changed its tenor（要旨，大意）: her mystical power overrode Hu’s banal（陈腐。平庸） soft power. Last Sunday, after China placed fourth in the team relay, Fu made headlines again. Grimacing（扮鬼脸） on the pool deck, she attributed her personal performance to menstrual cramps（经期痉挛）. She was immediately hailed as a taboo-breaking pioneer. As a Chinese blogger remarked, “The West has made a big fuss about（大惊小怪） this feminist athlete’s stance（立场，姿势）. But what if she wasn’t trying to make a statement and was just saying what she was feeling?”

Had Fu hailed from another country, her emotional transparency might not have received quite as much notice. But her capacity to speak extemporaneously（[ekstempə'reiniəsli]无准备地，临时地，即兴地）, rather than recite the agenda of the motherland, is something new. Few Chinese citizens today remember a China without an authoritarian（[ɔː,θɒrɪ'teərɪən]独裁主义的）, top-down（自上而下的，组织管理严密的） leadership, just as few Chinese athletes have ever experienced sport without entering its politically pressurized industrial complex. In this sense, Fu is no exception. “I started swimming to get healthier, because I was quite weak as a girl,” she said during a live social-media broadcast at the Games. “I used to quite like it, but now that it has become my career I can’t say if I like it or not. It’s become part of my life.” Still, Fu’s demeanor（[di'mi:nə]风度，举止，行为） suggests that swimming, for her, is not all about strengthening the race or the nation. Before the Western media caught onto her idiosyncratic（特质的，特殊的） charm, a Chinese friend messaged me to talk about the Fu phenomenon. “Her words and attitude!” my friend wrote. “She is probably one of the first Chinese athletes to take the Olympics Games as lightly as games!”