China at the Olympic Games! Is this the perfect illustration of some of the distinctive features of the Chinese people? Philippe Laurent, founder of MandarinMaster, tells us about it.
According to him, the number of gold medals that China won at the 2024 Olympics or the spectacular opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics in 2008, say a lot about the characteristics of Chinese athletes and about Chinese people in general.
If China is the 2nd most medal-winning country at the 2024 Olympics, just behind the United States, it won 40 out of 91 gold medals, as much as the United States, which won a total of 125.
China's top 10 medal sports disciplines at the 2024 Olympics:
1. Swimming (12 medals including 2 gold medals)
2. Diving (11 medals including 8 gold medals)
3. Archery (10 medals including 5 gold medals)
4. Artistic Gymnastics (9 medals including 2 gold medals)
5. Table tennis (6 medals including 5 gold medals)
6. Weightlifting (5 gold medals)
7. Boxing (5 medals including 3 gold medals)
8. Badminton (5 medals including 2 gold medals)
9. Athletics (4 medals including 1 gold medal)
10. Artistic swimming (2 gold medals)
Philippe, what do you think sets China apart during the Olympic Games?
For me, behind the exceptional performances of the Chinese athletes at the 2024 Olympics (with their 40 gold medals) lies their visceral ambition for the collective.
Every athlete goes above and beyond : his country, his community, his family. He is the proud representative and wants to do them honor, even before putting on a fair personal performance.
When we look at the gold medals won by China at the 2024 Olympics today, the most striking thing is the athletes' level of perfection in everything that involves synchronizing the collective gesture: synchronized diving, synchronized swimming, artistic gymnastics... This level of perfection is spectacular, indicative of Chinese precision and virtuosity, the result of incredibly demanding individual and collective training.
I remember the famous opening ceremony of the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing. China took advantage of this historic moment to show the world its ability to reach heights of perfection, with an unparalleled level of synchronization.
I still have before my eyes this stadium full of athletes and extras on the lawn (2008 exactly) to represent, to the nearest tenth of a second, the history of China, its evolution, with this yellow-orange color, so symbolic of ancient China.
The quest for the Perfection to the millimeter, typical of China, blew the screen of several billion viewers.
The Chinese exception is also reflected in the speed, precision and accuracy of the gesture in space and time. Chinese excellence in Table tennis This is a good demonstration.
A Chinese athlete is certainly in an individual performance, but he represents China, and wants to make China win. He is proud for his country, proud for his family and wants to honor them.
Chinese people's ambition is based above all on the feeling of belonging to a group, and on the visceral attachment to their family. It is this solid base that gives him his resistance, that gives him the desire to be the best and to maintain this ambition.
Let's remember that Chinese people live in families, welcoming 3 or 4 generations into their homes.
Before reaching the top, the Chinese athlete undergoes extremely hard training. When I see a Chinese man get a gold medal, I say to myself, “God, what a job he had to do to get here!”
All athletes in the world must submit to a discipline if they want to win, but the Chinese athlete is ready to sacrifice even his life as an athlete to make his country shine in the face of the world. Not to mention that the selectors have an eye for identifying very young talent.
I am thinking of this Chinese pianist, Lang Lang, one of the greatest performers in the world today. What virtuosity! I remember watching this video where we see little Lang Lang saying: “I want to be at the top, I want to be the best, better than the others (...) because I want to please my parents, and I want to please myself because whatever I do, I want to be the first”
In the mind of a Chinese person, the very important idea behind the effort is : “Ok, I'm going to push myself, it's going to be hard, I'm going to work 6, 8, 10, 12 hours a day, whatever, but I want my parents to be proud.” And even today, when Lang Lang is on stage, we can see it.
On another video, we see him calling his father who comes on stage to play with him with his erhu, a traditional two-string guitar.
The role of the coach
Behind a winning Chinese athlete, there is an extremely demanding coach who will push him to exhaustion so that the perfect gesture becomes a reflex.
If he is drowned in the collective, a Chinese person has the will not to be the second or the third but Well the first, the best in all things. Whether at school or within Chinese society, he has this ambition. to stand out from the crowd while staying in the frame. And since everyone has this ambition, in other words, the collective works wonders.
When we see Lang Lang perform today Liszt's Campanella, which is one of the most difficult pieces on piano, his level of technical mastery is such that he gives the impression of effortlessly having fun. This perfection is found in the Chinese pianist Yujia Wang, trained by the same coach as Lang Lang.
What can you say in front of such a performance? Nothing. Just admire.
