Diving China's Chosen Ones

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

The use of Olympic athletes as instruments of state propaganda is widely in disrepute. Most of the totalitarian sports factories are being dismantled amid public disgust at the huge sums spent on facilities, the privileges and cash bestowed on winners, the epidemic abuse of steroids and other drugs and the emotional wreckage bred by taking children from parents at a tender age, training them obsessively for one task and tossing them aside when their competitive days are over. But in one nation, especially in one sport, the old ways are unrepentantly deployed. For China's divers, who are recruited starting at age five and often sent by age eight to compounds where training - methods are state secrets, the expected result is a flotilla of medals. It had better be: after the Seoul Games in 1988, the Minister of Sports was sacked from the Cabinet because the teams won fewer medals than politicians had hoped for.

China's diving dominance emerged in 1986, when its performers captured the largest number of medals at the quadrennial world championships. They were overshadowed, however, by the sport's premier personality, Greg Louganis of the U.S., whose career held at peak level for a dozen years, from a silver medal at the Montreal Olympics in 1976 to two golds at Seoul. Now that Louganis has retired, the Chinese have the potential to sweep all four gold medals in Barcelona, for 10-m platform and 3-m springboard diving for men and women, and add several silvers or bronzes.

The likeliest medalist among them is the youngest, Fu Mingxia. Although she did not even know how to swim when she started diving six years ago, she took gold in the platform at the Goodwill Games in 1990 and again at last year's world championships, when she was just 12. She will be shy of 14 when she attempts the toughest optional dives by any woman at Barcelona. Her age -- or rather, the small size that goes with it -- is probably an advantage. A former gymnastics student and still well proportioned for that sport (5 ft. tall and 93 lbs.), she is light and quick enough for the multiple midair spins of a platform champion.

On the springboard, the front runner is Fu's elder teammate, Gao Min, 21, who won gold at Seoul and the worlds, although Fu captured a springboard title in Shanghai in April. Gao's amazing "air" sense enables her to complete more of her twists while still ascending.

Among Chinese men, the platform title figures to go down to the water between Xiong Ni, 18, who as a 14-year-old almost beat Louganis in Seoul, and Sun Shuwei, 16, who in his first year of international competition edged Xiong in both the 1990 Asian Games and the worlds. Nothing if not politically correct, Sun told the Chinese monthly New Sports, "When I'm served my favorite noodles, I can eat a lot. But when I'm served Western food, I'd rather starve than swallow a mouthful. I ate a hot dog and threw up." On the springboard, Barcelona represents a last hope for Tan Liangde, 27, second to Louganis at both the Los Angeles and Seoul Games.

Chinese officials are quick to deny that undue resources pour into competitive sports. But in a nation with only 60 swimming pools, there are 10 elite diving schools. Students are supervised virtually nonstop, cut off from families unless relatives happen to live nearby, forbidden to date until their 20s and expected to train so hard that most wind up unfit for work outside athletics. Some are left virtually illiterate in a land where, by Confucian tradition, intellectual pursuits are prized over physical ones. In exchange, athletes (and often their families) enjoy better jobs and housing. They wear imported athletic clothing. If they make the 20-or-so-member national team, from age 14 on they earn an average worker's salary, with bonuses for major victories. An Olympic gold medal brings 20,000 yuan, or about $3,700, equivalent to the average per capita income for a quarter-century. Says a prominent Chinese sports journalist: "Fu Mingxia is a money tree for her family." Still, that Olympic bonus is less than a fifth of what the Soviet Union offered athletes for gold at Seoul -- and about one-third of 1% of what American gymnast Mary Lou Retton earned from capitalist sources after her Olympic heyday.

With reporting by Mia Turner/Beijing