Forging of the Mandarin mermaid: How Chinese children are taken away from their families and brutalised into future Olympians

By DAVID JONES

Winning at all costs: Children are put through their paces doing punishing exercises to toughen them up

Watching the new ‘Mandarin Mermaid’ glide to another suspiciously easy victory yesterday - the prelude to what will doubtless be her second gold medal of these Games - my thoughts returned to the disturbing interview I conducted with another swimming sensation many years ago.
Just like China’s Ye Shiwen, East German Petra Schneider had astonished the world in winning the 400 metres medley - this time at the 1980 Moscow Olympics - producing a performance of such awesome power that her rivals (including Britain’s Sharron Davis, who won silver) seemed to be lesser mortals.

Children are trained at camps where the word 'gold' is hung on the wall to make them focus on success


And as with 16-year-old Ye in London on Saturday night, so striking was Schneider’s superiority over young women who had trained equally long and hard that many observers wondered how she could possibly have been so much stronger, fitter and faster.
This disquieting question cast a shadow over her achievement for 18 years. But then, during that unforgettable interview, in her cramped apartment in Chemnitz - or Karl-Marx-Stadt as it had been known when she was among the stars of the East German state swimming project - the five-time world record-holder finally came clean.

Sweat and tears: A young girl is pushed through a tough gymnastics exercise

Having been identified as a potential champion as a little girl, she told me, she had been removed from school and placed in a ruthless training camp where she was identified by a number, Sportsperson 137, rather than a name.
There her every waking hour was devoted to bringing swimming glory to her country.
To increase her oxygen uptake she was forced to swim for hour upon hour in a vacuum contraption that sucked out the surrounding air; she was fed like a battery-farm turkey on a protein-rich diet; and, of course, she was injected with steroids - so frequently that, even then in her mid-30s, she suffered a plethora of health problems.

Ye Shiwen astounded the swimming world by knocking more than a second off the world record for the 400m individual medley

‘Sharron Davies was not racing against another swimmer that day - she was racing against a different species,’ she told me tearfully in an extraordinary mea culpa which later saw her ask for her world records to be expunged. ‘I was programmed to take the gold.’
Was the equally invincible Ye Shiwen similarly programmed? As with everyone who marvelled at the way she eased through the water yesterday, like a killer whale in her white cap and black costume, I hope — oh, how I hope — she was not.

Mission accomplished: Miss Ye poses with her gold medal on the podium. Ye insists that her 'results come from hard work and training'

Yet recalling the photographs Schneider had showed me of herself at a similar age, one well understands the fears voiced by America’s top swimming coach.
Indeed, they must have flashed through the minds of even the most casual spectator yesterday, so much stronger did she look than the young women beside her.

Young boys and girls are put through their paces at the Chen Jinglun Sports School, the alma mater of Ye Shiwen

Ye Shiwen possesses that same masculine, almost wall-like figure; the same impossibly wide shoulders and huge, rounded thighs; the same armchair-leg calves. Rebecca Adlington is a strong woman, to be sure, but she still looks feminine; Ye, though barely out of adolescence, appears androgynous.
China’s recent swimming history mitigates against Ye, too.

The school also trained Sun Yang, who won the 400m freestyle at London 2012

For during recent years its swimmers and coaches have been caught cheating so many times it is difficult to keep count - and it has modelled its draconian training system on precisely that which produced Schneider and other turbo-charged East Germans before the Iron Curtain fell.
It began in the Eighties when, determined to end the nation’s perennial humiliation at major athletics and swimming championships, China’s Communist regime decreed that a generation of future champions must be harvested and honed.

Practice makes perfect: Children are put through their paces in a training session at Chen Jinglun Sports School

To that end, school teachers were ordered to scrutinise their pupils for signs of natural sporting ability and report any child with obvious potential to regional coaches who would install them in one of 3,000 new state training camps.
According to her mother, Qing Dingyi, as quoted by the Chinese state media, little Ye ‘expressed a wish to become a swimmer at the tender age of seven’.
In truth, she was picked out because she had an unusually masculine physique with extremely large hands and long limbs: attributes at first thought best suited to a career in track and field.

Starting young: Olympic champions Sun Yang and Ye Shiwen were earmarked from a young age as potential future champions

The school recruits about 900 children from kindergartens in Hangzhou each year, with their parents all but forced to accept their fate

Ye's team-mate, 23-year-old Lu Ying, this week attacked China's grindingly repetitive coaching regime

source: dailymail