'We told the world with our fists that China is strong'Boxing was
banned in China by Mao but, with the country gripped by Olympic fever,
Zou ****ming has emerged as a genuine contender for their first gold
medal in the s****t. The question is: can one man cope with the
expectation of 1.3 billion people?
Evan Osnos
The Observer,
Sunday May 4 2008
http://www.guardian.co.uk/s****t/2008/may/04/boxing.china
'We told the world with our fists that china is strong'
Zou ****ming, the captain of China's national boxing team, arrived
early for a banquet in his honour at a Chinese restaurant on a cold
night in Chicago, where the world amateur champion****ps were being
held late last year. Zou will be 27 later this month, stands just
under 5ft 5in, and looks boyish enough to be a teenager, but wrinkles
form beside his eyes when he smiles. The speck of a scar by his left
eye is not from boxing but from a girl who once bullied him in school.
He has sharp cheekbones, a thick brush of black hair, and a long,
aquiline nose. His fighting weight is 48kg, and before each
competition he spends most of a month famished. He gets grumpy and
irritable, and then apologises. For distraction, he gnaws on
watermelon slices and spits out the pulp. Or he pulls up pictures of
lamb noodles and posts them on his blog.
His team-mates were still outside, window-shopping, but Zou took a
seat at an empty table. He laid out a Chinese newspaper and scanned
the headlines, with little interest. The bridge of his nose was puffy
and blue from his last bout, a few hours earlier. He was still in his
red-and-white team warm-up suit with 'China' embroidered in gold
thread across the back. On his left breast he wore a small brass pin
of Mao Zedong's head - a gift from his coach, Zhang Chuanliang, whom
he calls Teacher Zhang. After eight days of competition, Zou's cheeks
had hollowed, and his smile was tired. 'I'm hungry,' he said in
Chinese.
Zou could feast now. He had won his second world title earlier on that
November day, confirming his place as the first boxer in Chinese
history to be considered a contender for an Olympic gold medal. A few
years ago, it was hard to imagine that a Chinese boxer could win
anything. The s****t was banned for decades, because Mao's government
considered it too violent and too Western. It was not allowed until
1986, after s****ts authorities made a calculation: boxing has 11
weight cl*****, thereby providing dozens of medal op****tunities. That
means a lot to a government that has elevated the hunt for Olympic
medals to a state religion, a faith never more fervent than today, as
China prepares to host the 2008 Olympics, in Beijing. Chinese boxing
officials have a name for their objective: the 'zero-gold-medal
breakthrough'.
'Our target for the 2008 Olympics is explicit: one gold medal,' Chang
Jianping, the president of the Chinese Boxing Association, told me.
When the Beijing News asked Teacher Zhang, the team's head coach, what
he thought of that prospect, he replied: 'The entire team has only one
person really capable of capturing the gold - Zou ****ming.'
Zou's first fight in Chicago fell during lunchtime, and the crowd was
sparse. Only muffled thuds and the polyglot shouts of opposing
cornermen broke the stillness of the arena, at the University of
Illinois at Chicago. Two rings had been erected side by side, so that
simultaneous fights could speed up the opening rounds.
The world outside had intruded already. The Cuban team, from which two
fighters have defected in recent years, were boycotting the
competition, saying that they suspected a conspiracy by the 'most vile
interests of the United States and some of its allies: the theft of
athletes'. Separately, two Ugandan fighters, including the team
captain, had vanished from their hotel with their suitcases. One later
called the coach to say, with apologies, that he was in Canada, but
made no mention of returning home.
Zou walked silently to the ring. The announcer stumbled over his name
('Sheeming Joe!'), to a polite flutter of applause. Zou slipped
through the ropes. In his corner, in a hooded sweat****rt, stood
Teacher Zhang, who looked so unprepossessing that he might have been a
spectator who had stepped up for a closer look. Zhang coached martial
arts until 1986, when he switched to boxing. At 54, he is trim and
good-looking, with a brush cut that, like many Chinese men his age, he
dyes an inky black. He has little appetite for conversation, but if he
is asked about fighting his eyes sparkle and he embarks on long,
precise paragraphs. He has done more than anybody else to define
China's boxing style, yet he is so averse to attention that he can
sometimes be found napping in the locker room during medal ceremonies
while his fighters are on the podium. Zhang's indifference to
formality is unusual, to say the least, in China's s****ts bureaucracy.
'The leaders don't like him,' a coach who has known him for many years
says. 'He has never kissed the leaders' arses.'
A trio of Chinese s****ts officials had filed in and taken ringside
seats. Zou turned toward Zhang and embraced him for a long moment over
the top rope, his glove curled around the older man's head. After more
than a decade with Teacher Zhang, Zou mentions him more often than he
does his parents. 'We're like father and son,' Zou says. The hug is a
pre-fight ritual. 'It calms me down.'
Zou turned back to his opponent, Constantin Paraschiv. At the bell,
the Romanian came out in a hurry, his fists clamped beside his face.
He was energetic and aggressive, firing jabs and prompting Zou to
backpedal or list from the waist. Zou looked uninspired. He threw few
punches. He drifted around the ring, pursued by the Romanian. As they
went back to their corners at the end of the first round, Paraschiv
led, three points to two.
Teacher Zhang stood close to Zou's face, spoke softly, and tipped a
trickle of bottled water into his mouth. When the bell rang, Zou
sprang forward and buried a left-right combination to even the score.
He set his stance farther apart than before and bounced lightly on the
balls of his feet. He scissored his legs, a homage to his idol,
Muhammad Ali. His first round, it seemed, had been a warm-up. He
glided around Paraschiv, pausing only to flick a combination into the
Romanian's padded brow. Every time Paraschiv swung his fist, Zou eased
out of the way and counterpunched. Paraschiv, pivoting and swinging in
vain, did not score another point in the round. Or, for that matter,
in either of the two rounds that followed.
Zou rarely knocks opponents out. He batters them and darts out of
reach, like an angry sparrow. Sometimes he holds his fists so low that
they drop below his waist, a caricature of Ali. Zou fights at
light-flyweight, the lightest Olympic class. But, even among boxers
his size, Zou is known for exceptional speed. After he beat Paddy
Barnes, I asked the Irishman what had happened. Zou's left hand, he
replied. 'It's that fast. I could hardly see it coming.' When the
American Rau'Shee Warren was on his way to losing to Zou in the 2004
Olympics, in Athens, Warren told his corner that he could not keep up:
'I'm telling the coach, "Dang, he can move, and I can't catch him!"'
By the final bell, Zou had scored 13 punches on Paraschiv in a row, to
win 15-3. The Romanian was flushed and slumped. He had spent three
rounds slugging air. After the referee held Zou's arm aloft, Zou bowed
to the judges and ducked through the ropes. He climbed down from the
ring and headed for the front row, where the officials were seated.
China's boxing boss, Chang, a jolly, broad-faced man in a maroon
blazer, sat with provincial s****ts officials. Zou greeted each with a
two-handed shake, nodded at their comments, and thanked them. I came
to recognise the ritual after every one of his fights: the beeline to
the officials at ringside, the two-handed shakes. Sweat pouring down
his face, Zou listened closely to the men in suit jackets. S****ts
officials in China are among those who have a hand in shaping an
athlete's future: where he lives, the terms by which he goes pro. On
the evening news, they march in hard hats around new stadiums or
huddle over blueprints. I wondered what they could possibly tell Zou
about his fight that he did not know already.
Zou's emergence startled American boxing purists, who have been slow
to warm to his style. After Zou's fight, I asked the United States'
head coach, Dan Campbell, what he thought. 'I didn't think anything of
him,' Campbell said. 'He did the thing that he did in the Olympics,
hitting with this part of his hand, and this part,' Campbell went on,
gesturing dismissively to the sides of his fist.
That criticism does not bother Teacher Zhang. Zou's medals are the
evidence he needs. 'If he can win points,' Zhang said, 'even if he can
fight with you he won't waste his energy.'
Zou was born on 18 May 1981 in the mountain city of Zunyi, in Guizhou,
one of China's poorest provinces. His parents lived and worked in a
factory district that produced defence equipment under the ministry of
aerospace. His father, Zou Jianguo (his given name means 'build the
nation'), was an engineer. He was gentle and remote, and worked
relentlessly. Now in his fifties, Zou Jianguo is slender, with a
ripple of tidy black hair. At one point, he considered joining the
Communist Party. 'I tried, but I did not meet the Party's standard,'
he said. 'I always tried. I always tried.'
Zou's mother was as outgoing as her husband was reserved. She was a
kindergarten teacher in the factory school. She excelled at table
tennis; he preferred basketball. Their son, an only child, was small
for his age, and they kept him close to home. When I met her in Zunyi
and asked about Zou's upbringing, she laughed. 'When he was little, he
looked like a little girl, with his head of curly hair,' she said.
'My mother raised me too much like a girl,' Zou told me. 'I couldn't
talk too loud. I couldn't run or play around like other boys.
Characteristics that should come out didn't come out. I didn't like to
talk to people, maybe because my spirit was suppressed.'
As he grew up, Zou discovered television martial-arts dramas about
fabled swordsmen. One of his favourite heroes was Zhang Sanfeng, a
Taoist mystic of the 13th or 14th century, who is considered the
father of Tai Chi. Legend describes him as seven-feet tall, with
immense eyes and ears, and a fondness for clothes made of leaves.
When Zou was 12 his parents enrolled him in a private school to study
wushu, a modern hybrid s****t based on traditional martial arts. They
expected him to end up as a physical-education teacher with a stable
job and a pension. But Zou was bored by wushu, which he thought
emphasised form over fighting. He was attracted to boxing, which
seemed explosive and free. When Zou asked his mother if he could
switch to boxing, she thought the idea was preposterous. 'You are too
delicate,' she recalls saying. 'How can you train as a boxer?' And she
added: 'If you don't want your mum to sleep at night, then go box.'
Zou told his parents that he would stick to martial arts, but he began
training with the school boxing team. 'I fell madly in love with
boxing,' he said. 'In the ring, I could truly let myself go. I wasn't
subject to my mother's or anyone else's control.'
In 1995, Zou transferred to the Zunyi S****t School, one of China's
Soviet-style s****ts institutes. One July day, he showed up with 1,900
other children to try out for the school's athletic teams. The boxing
team had only four spots.
First, the young athletes faced the measuring tape. Chinese coaches
put extraordinary faith in *****sing a child's dimensions, sometimes
with the help of X-rays, to deduce athletic potential. It was the
system that identified the basketball star Yao Ming when he was a
child. Boxing coaches were interested only in athletes with a long
reach - that is, children whose wingspan exceeded their height by
three centimetres. Zou's outstretched arms measured a full centimetre
less than his height, and the coaches discarded him in the first
round.
Two weeks later, Zou showed up again, and stood with the other
applicants. 'I thought, "This kid's clever and he's willing to
suffer,"' Liang Feng, the coach who was running the try-outs, told me.
Coach Liang put gloves on the boy and sent him in for a round. It was
an unremarkable debut. 'He was frightened, timid,' Liang said. But
Zou's martial-arts training had given him good footwork, and he seemed
to have a natural sense of distance, knowing how to lunge and withdraw
to stay just out of his opponent's reach. He was nimble and willing to
train harder than the other rookies. 'He was like a machine, just
running without stopping,' Liang said. The coach took a chance and put
Zou on the team; a year later, in his first big tournament, he made it
to the finals against a strong competitor. And then he buckled. 'The
whole fight, he ran around,' Liang said. 'He didn't dare to fight.'
Still, Liang was not ready to give up, believing that fear could be a
form of protection. Besides, Zou was at the gym all day, every day,
except for a few hours on Sunday. When nobody else showed up on the
eve of Chinese New Year, he trained alone. When the arena was locked
for the holiday, he and a friend jumped a fence to run on the track
until a security guard chased them away. Coach Liang recommended him
for the provincial team, and failed to mention his arm measurements.
'If I didn't hide that, it would be over,' Liang said.
Zou's parents continued to disapprove of his boxing, and demanded that
he stop. A coach paid them a visit at home. He emphasised the safety
of the headgear that is designed to protect amateur boxers against
injuries. He argued that Olympic boxing is not like the heavyweight
prizefights on television. Whereas professionals pound each other in
search of a knockout blow, Olympic boxers win most often on points,
relying on speed and accuracy to land the most punches during four
two-minute rounds. The coach also mentioned that his own son was
boxing, which Zou's mother found reassuring. 'He told us that in
strong boxing countries, like the United States and Cuba, children
from the age of two or three can go to the boxing gym to train,' she
said. 'It's like ping-pong in China.'
Zou's parents had no reason to be familiar with the s****t. Western
boxing, as it was known, had first appeared in China in the 1920s, in
the ****t cities of Shanghai and Guangzhou, where foreign sailors were
pitted against local fighters. The s****t grew, unsupervised. In 1953,
at a big competition in the northern city of Tianjin, a boxer died
after a bout. S****ts authorities were unnerved and in 1959, as China
organised its first national games, it dropped boxing from the
line-up. Mao was driving his nation deeper into isolation: the Great
Leap Forward, his disastrous push for an industrial breakthrough, was
already heading towards a famine that killed more than 30 million
people. The political atmosphere was increasingly hostile to Western
im****ts. As Fan Hong, a scholar who specialises in China's athletic
history, puts it: 'People believed that boxing was very brutal, very
ruthless, and those were said to be the characteristics of capitalism.
So it was banned.'
When the Cultural Revolution engulfed China, in 1966, the Communist
Party banned competitive s****ts and athletes who had won medals in the
past found themselves accused of jinbiao zhuyi, or 'trophy mania', a
charge of pursuing victory more zealously than Mao's vision of mass
fitness. The table tennis champion Rong Guotuan, who had been greeted
with parades a few years earlier, was detained on a trumped-up charge
of spying and later hanged himself. Before his death, he wrote: 'I
love my reputation more than my life.'
After the Cultural Revolution subsided, in 1969, China used table
tennis to reconnect with the world, sometimes throwing matches to
promote a friendlier mood. It was not until the late 1970s that Deng
Xiaoping decided that competition might be as good for athletics as it
was for the economy. In December 1979, Deng invited Muhammad Ali to
the heavily guarded compound housing China's top leaders. The champ
hugged him. They sat. And the word went out. 'Now the message was: "If
we want to win friends, if we want to win respect, we have to win
medals",' Fan said.
In the following decade, Chinese boxers began training again, after a
fa****on. 'We had no bag or gloves,' Liu Gang, one of the earliest
recruits and now a promoter, said. 'In three months, I wore out two
pairs of white cotton shoes. We punched sandbags.' Liu went on to the
1992 Olympics, in Barcelona, where competitors were delighted to be
drawn against Chinese opponents. The best that their coaches hoped for
was that each fighter might stay on his feet a bit longer than the one
before him.
Today, as China transforms itself for the Olympics, Beijing is
determined to broadcast a picture of prosperity. It is overhauling
parts of the city that had not changed much since the 13th century,
razing miles of one-storey brick alleys that Mongol conquerors
designed to uniform widths of 12 or 24 paces. It is building a new
world of vertical apartment complexes, with foreign names such as the
Greenwich and the Upper East Side. Underground, a web of subway lines
has more than doubled in length in barely six years. Olympic guests
will step through an air****t terminal that will be the largest in the
world. In this atmosphere, any feat of preparation seems plausible.
One Chinese ****k supplier vowed to produce specially pampered pigs, to
ensure that hormone-fed meat would not cause athletes to give false
positives in doping tests. Only after Chinese citizens began wondering
about their own ****k did a Beijing Olympic Committee spokesperson
issue a 'Clarification on Olympic Pig-Related Re****ts', denouncing the
****k story as an 'exaggerated falsehood'.
In the Games proper, China hopes to win more gold than ever before. At
the founding of the People's Republic, in 1949, no Chinese athlete had
ever stood on an Olympic podium; by the close of the 2004 Summer
Games, in Athens, China trailed only the United States, 32 to 36, in
that year's gold medals. Chinese s****ts officials scrutinise, dissect,
and forecast the medal race with an intensity that lends it the air of
science - convinced that sufficient analysis will eventually engineer
away the frailty of a diver in mid-air or a fighter in the ring. In
2000, Chinese officials launched the Project 119, a campaign to win
more gold medals in the Summer Games' most competitive events - a list
that by China's calculation totalled 119 medals.
In Athens, China's gold tally reflected its focus on producing an
elite cadre of champion****p-level performers. Most Olympic delegations
return home with more bronzes and silvers than golds. Out of the top
15 nations in the medal table at Athens, only China had more golds
than bronze and silver combined - albeit by the margin of 32 to 31.
China now cultivates s****ts that it never cared about before, events
that (like boxing) increase a medal count because they include various
weight cl***** or categories. Chinese athletes and coaches have also
begun to defy their long-held belief that they can never best larger,
taller Western competitors. And doing so is particularly glorious, as
the sprinter Liu Xiang indicated after he won a gold medal in the
110metres hurdles in Athens. 'I believe I achieved a modest miracle
for the yellow-skinned Chinese people and the Asian people,' he said
afterwards.
The elite athletes who bear the responsibility for realising the
country's ambitions live in privileged isolation. Their talents are
treated as public goods, but while they are practising they live in
secluded s****ts complexes, where they eat, sleep, and train under
coaches' instructions. If national-team members have commercial
endorsements, they are required to share the money with their team
staff and the state. When the Olympic diving champion Guo Jingjing was
criticised, two years ago, for having too many 'commercial
activities', she appeared on state television to apologise. 'I belong
to the country,' she said. As a boxer, Zou is even more cloistered,
because his s****t sanctifies monastic training. At times, coaches
confiscate his mobile phones to eliminate distractions.
Soon after Zou made his provincial team, in 1996, Teacher Zhang began
to notice his extraordinary work ethic. Zhang had set out to develop a
distinct Chinese style of boxing. He was studying fighters from Cuba,
Russia, and the US. 'Asian people have different abilities and body
types than Americans or Europeans,' Zhang told me last autumn. 'We
have to fight with flexibility and fight with speed. Because, after
all, you don't often win by knocking people out. Fight with your mind.
Fight with strategy.'
In 2003, Zou won his first national champion****p and drew political
recognition; he was named one of the 10 outstanding young persons in
Guizhou province and, later, a national advanced worker. Like other
national champions, he joined the Communist Party.
Chinese re****ters nicknamed him the Dark Horse at first. Later, they
tried the Knight of Lightning or the Fox or, sometimes, the Pirate,
all celebrating his knack for snatching points and peeling away from
his opponents' reach. That strategy was helping him win international
matches. In Athens, Zou made it to the semi-finals, so winning a
bronze, China's first medal in boxing. He captured headlines, but when
he returned home his achievement paled against the frenzy over Liu
Xiang's gold in the hurdles. Zou's loss in the semis began to feel
like a failure. 'Making a mistake in an event as grand as the
Olympics, and to come so close to a gold medal, is a feeling that is
inscribed into your bones and printed on your heart,' he told me. It
was another year before Zou won his first gold medal, at the 2005
world champion****ps, held in the western Chinese city of Mianyang. He
was the nation's first amateur boxing champion, and China celebrated.
For him, the lesson was unmistakable: 'You must win the champion****p
in order to get acknowledgment.'
The following year, Zou started a blog where he posted his diary
entries and photographs. Entering the site triggers a twinkling piano
tune, the first in a long loop of his favourite songs. A few hours
after he posted his first message, a fan wrote: 'You are the pride of
the Chinese people!' Some days, Zou writes about fighting ('I'm fully
confident that in tomorrow's combat I cannot fail!'). On others, he
posts a picture of himself strolling on a beach or flying a kite. He
writes of his struggles: 'Often, when I sleep, my legs don't know
where to go. No matter how I lie, I can't sleep comfortably. Worst of
all, in a flash, the whistle blows and it's time to get out of bed
again to train.'
After midnight one night in the winter of 2006, he wrote: 'This week's
training has been really tough, and the added intensity is bringing
out ac***ulated years' worth of pain, to the point that my back hurts
so much it is keeping me awake.' It was a week before the Chinese New
Year, the most im****tant family holiday, and he was spending it, once
again, at a training centre far from home. 'The thought of the pain
and homesickness troubles my mind. It's late at night, I'm still
unable to sleep, and I really want to find a good friend to chat with,
but I feel bad to bother them. So I'll just pour out my heart to
everyone, and hope people encourage me to shake off this spell of
being down!' He received five comments immediately. Someone using the
name A Secret Sup****ter wrote: 'I, too, am far from home, and I know
what you are experiencing.'
Zou won the Chicago champion****p with ease. In his final match, he
routed a Filipino, 17-3. Even Dan Campbell, the American coach, said
that he was impressed. After the national anthems, Zou wandered
through the halls of the arena but drew little attention from the
American fans streaming past. China's state news service once ranked
him number four on the list of the nation's top athletes, three places
behind Yao Ming, but outside China Zou remains virtually unknown. In
addition to Zou's gold medal, China had won four bronzes, its best
finish ever. When the team returned to Beijing, after an all-night
flight, Chinese re****ters were waiting for Zou in the terminal. They
gave him bouquets of flowers and launched an impromptu press
conference around his luggage cart. The next morning's Beijing News
carried a story about his return, headlined with a quote: 'We Told the
World with Our Fists That China Is Strong.'
If Zou's home town were in the United States, its seven million people
would make it America's second-largest city, but Zunyi doesn't have an
air****t, so when teams from China, Kazakhstan, and the United States
arrived in late November for a friendly competition they landed in
Chongqing, a three-hour flight from Beijing. From there, they took a
three-hour bus ride through mountain tunnels and gullies, around
terraced fields, and into the clanging centre of Zunyi.
Zou's picture was on the front page of the Zunyi Evening News, on
cardboard cutouts beside restaurants that serve bumblebee larvae, a
local delicacy. The façade of the Fuyuan Hotel was plastered with two
huge posters of Zou in the ring. In English and Chinese, they said:
'Welcome to the Return of the King from Victory.'
It was Zou's first competition here in years, and the event was to
last three days. His face was printed on the tickets. His first
opponent was a Kazakh. The match was lopsided and brief; midway
through the second round, Zou was pummelling the hapless man, 20-0,
when the referee stopped the fight. Zou waved to the audience and
jogged back to the sanctuary of his locker room. Fights were still
under way, but a frenzied crowd of kids began to mass outside the
locker-room door, which was guarded by police, except for the police
who wandered inside to ask Zou for his autograph.
'Get changed!' Teacher Zhang murmured. 'If you wait until the end, it
will be hard to leave. This is a small town.' The door opened a crack,
revealing a wall of young, reddened faces pressed against a
policeman's outstretched arm. The door slammed shut. Zou stepped out
of his trunks and pulled on jeans and a Brazil soccer jersey. The room
smelled of sweat and garlic. From the sound of it, the crowd outside
was growing. He looked at his coach. They were, for the moment,
trapped. Well-wishers had left giant bouquets of flowers on the table
in the locker room, so Zou grabbed two of them and held them in front
of his face as a ****eld. And then he and his coach pressed into the
maw of the crowd. Teenagers swarmed, jostling and shouting. Zou smiled
and thanked them, but pushed forward. By the time he had squeezed into
the stairwell and down to a waiting bus, the bouquets were shredded.
The next day, Zou and his parents visited relatives in town. They
climbed the steps to a modest two-bedroom apartment where the entry
hall was filled with a large, empty fish tank and a folded treadmill.
The apartment was decorated, more or less, with Zou: a wall poster of
his face beneath the phrase 'Everything for 2008'; a poem written in
calligraphy by another relative, which ended: 'Surprise the whole
world in year 2008.' Looking at it, I wondered how they would
redecorate once the Olympics were over. As we walked to lunch that
day, I asked Zou if his body was holding up. His back and his foot
have been bothering him for months. (He had told a Chinese re****ter:
'After endurance runs, I lie on the ground, and I can't tell the tears
from the sweat.') 'It's painful,' he said. 'But there's no time for
surgery before the Olympics. That will have to wait.'
I once asked him how it felt to live his life suspended between future
success and failure. 'I absolutely can't allow such a heavy burden to
feel like it's suffocating me, or I will bring those worries into the
ring,' he said.
The following night, in the final, Zou faced Luis Yanez, a confident,
experienced 19-year-old from Duncanville, Texas, who had won a
succession of amateur titles on his way to the American Olympic team.
After years of hearing about Zou, he had a strategy: 'He drops his
hands a lot and holds his hands down, and I got a quick jab, so if I
just keep my jab out there in his face he won't have them down there
no more,' Yanez told me. 'But he's a good little fighter. He's slick.'
The arena holds about 5,000 people, and that night it was packed. The
walls did not meet the roof, and it was cold inside; the ring-card
girls huddled in parkas during the rounds. The city had made special
preparations for its foreign guests: officials were identified with
signs intended to be bilingual. A Chinese sign indicated the
'Arbitrator's Seat'. The English letters below read 'Arditrator eat'.
Not that the American team was unaccustomed to communication trouble;
team members had spent part of the day at a pharmacy trying to mime
the symptoms of a stomach ailment.
Zou jogged out of the locker room draped in a golden robe, his face
hidden beneath the hood. Only his gloves were visible, firing jabs
into the cool night air. High over his head, a banner along the
rafters ran the length of the stadium wall, with an enormous picture
of him in mid-fight. When the announcer said his name, the crowd went
berserk. On the upper deck, a man unfurled a red Chinese flag as big
as a bedsheet, and Zou's cardboard blown-up face danced in the crowd.
Teacher Zhang had warned him before the fight not to let the attention
affect him. 'Don't try to prove anything or show off,' Zhang said. 'Be
yourself, and you'll be fine.'
Yanez came out with no robe, jogging and sidestepping toward the ring,
flicking his gloves over his shoulders as if trying to shoo away an
insect. He climbed through the ropes, jogged in place, and settled
into a half-crouch to wait for the bell. The two surged into each
other. They wrestled and bear-hugged, tying each other up in
headlocks. The referee pulled them apart, and Zou buried a combination
into Yanez's head. The crowd loved it. Yanez responded with a broad
hook that missed by a foot.
Zou settled into a rhythm, and his fists dropped to his waist, his
gloves rolling loosely up and down, as if he were a timpani player,
rising only to peck at Yanez's temples. Yanez grew frustrated. He
lunged, angrily, but landed few punches. When the first round ended,
Zou led, 8-1. He turned back to his corner. He waved away his stool
and stood facing into the ring, his arms splayed comfortably on the
top rope. He looked at home there. It occurred to me that he has been
boxing almost half his life.
The second round drifted farther out of Yanez's grasp. Zou racked up
points, setting his feet to hit hard now, intent on landing a big
punch. He held his hands so low that they dropped behind his back,
pleading with Yanez to open himself up. As the third round ticked
down, Yanez was frantic, swinging broad hooks through the air. He
looked, suddenly, like a child. Zou stretched his lead to 19 points.
The bell sounded. With his chest heaving, Yanez plodded back to his
corner, but the American coach was already nodding to the referee.
Zou thrust his fists into the air. The audience erupted and began
pouring towards the ring. The fighters shook hands and Yanez slipped
away, unnoticed. Zou put on his golden robe, brilliant in the ring
lights, and stood alone, arms raised in the centre of the canvas. He
turned and faced the crowd of his countrymen, hundreds of them pressed
against the edge of the ring, mobile phones aloft, snapping pictures.
Zou seemed at peace with the knowledge that his country's self-regard
hinges on a single fight in his future, on a single medal. He has come
of age in China's system and, if it chafes him, he does not readily
admit to it. Like the pressure born of his talent, his role as a
political symbol seemed to be something he accepted long ago,
something larger than he is.
The 10 best Chinese athletes
1 Liu Xiang (Athletics)
The world and Olympic 110m hurdles champion broke Colin Jackson's
13-year-old world record in 2006. Aged 24, he should be reaching his
peak.
2 Yang Wei (Gymnastics)
Yang fell off the high bar in Athens in 2004, ruining his chance of
gold, but in 2007 became the first all-round world champion to defend
his title in 81 years.
3 Shen Xue &Amp; Zhao Hongbo (Figure skating)
Shen and her partner Zhao won gold at the Asian Games and the world
champion****ps last year, then announced their engagement.
4 Zhu Qinan (Shooting)
Broke the world record to win gold in the 10m air rifle at Athens aged
19 and, after sma****ng it again in October last year, he will be
favourite to retain his title.
5 Guo Jingjing (Diving)
A gossip-magazine staple with a string of high-profile boyfriends,
Guo, 26, won double gold in Athens and will bid for a repeat in
Beijing before retiring.
6 Zhang Guozheng (Weightlifting)
The reigning world champion will be defending his 69kg Olympic crown
in Beijing.
7 Zhu Lin (Badminton)
With China aiming for a clean sweep of the badminton medals, even
24-year-old world singles champion Zhu will have to see off tough
competition to qualify for the three-strong team.
8 Zou ****ming (Boxing)
The light-flyweight is China's first genuine Olympic boxing contender.
The Athens bronze medallist successfully defended his amateur world
title in Chicago last year.
9 Wu Peng (Swimming)
The man most likely to deny Michael Phelps a seven-gold Beijing haul.
He is on a $25,000 bonus if he pips the American to victory in the
200m butterfly.
10 Guo Yue (Table tennis)
The 19-year-old world champion is a household name in China, and even
her press conferences are broadcast live on state television.
China expects
Never mind the taking part, for China it's all about the winning.
Since they rejoined the Olympic family in 1984, having previously
boycotted the Games in protest at Taiwan's participation, their
progress has been extraordinary - China have gone from nought to 60
medals in just six Olympics. The remarkable aspect of China's rise has
been the pro****tion of golds: in Athens, they constituted more than
half of their total, putting them second in the medal table. This
time, no medal avenue is being overlooked.
In 2000 the authorities launched Project 119, a scheme aimed at
challenging for gold in some of the most medal-rich s****ts: athletics,
swimming and water s****ts. Chinese officials will be quietly confident
of overhauling the USA, but even they probably have no idea how high
they can go. We reckon 43 golds, 11 up from Athens, is a fair
estimate, based on linear performance trends, and the effect of home
advantage; then again, we really have no idea either.
Jonathan Liew
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