The Last Word: Lives given up in the pursuit of gold medals

Under China's unforgiving system athletes lose their childhood to cause of sporting supremacy

Zhang Chenglong has spent only 17 days with his family over the last 14 years. When he completed the pommel horse routine that guaranteed China a team gold medal in the men's gymnastics, he buried his face in his hands and wept uncontrollably. He was going home.

The mother of Fan Ye, another Chinese athlete, tried unsuccessfully to withdraw her daughter from a sports kindergarden in Shijiazhuang, a garrison city 150 miles south of Beijing, when she was aged seven. "Do you think she's only your daughter?" asked the gymnastics coach assigned to a slim, bright child with the requisite bone density. "She's state property now."

The diver Wu Minxia was not told of the death of her grandparents, or her mother's fight against breast cancer, because it might undermine her attempt to win a third Olympic diving title in London. "It was essential to tell this white lie," her father, Wu Yuming, confessed. "We accepted a long time ago that she doesn't entirely belong to us."

Suffer, little children. Sacrifice yourself to a greater cause, the motherland. Your childhood will be emotionally barren, a monochromatic existence of work and structured rest. One day, at an Olympic Games in a foreign city, it will all be worthwhile. Or will it?

Will you be aged 16, like Ye Shiwen, and be casually demonised because your sport refuses to abandon its sense of disbelief? Will you become dehumanised by the global debate about your record-breaking achievements as a swimmer? Will you suffer strangers, who demand to know whether you have taken performance enhancing drugs?

Or will you endure a career- ending injury, like Zhang Shangwu, the former World Games champion gymnast, and resort to begging in the Wangfujing shopping district in Beijing? Will you endure the indignity of the weightlifter Wu Jingbiao, and break down on state television? Will you deliver an abject apology to the nation for the sin of winning only a silver medal?

Legacy is the buzzword of these Olympic Games. It will have authenticity if London is one of the last human harvests for Juguo Tizhi, the Soviet-style sports system which has produced almost all 396 members of the team whose duty is to justify China as a sporting superpower.

Juguo Tizhi is literally translated as whole country support. It is a four-tier system based upon the drafting of 400,000 children into state sport schools. Many train thousands of miles from home. Life is a remorseless meritocracy, and only the strongest, like Fan Ye, survive to reach a pool of 3,000 Olympic contenders.

Fan was weighed every day, and allowed to drink water only by the mouthful. Her diet consisted of fish until she made the national team, when she was permitted meat, rice and protein powder. Her diet, and training regime delayed her maturity. She did not menstruate until she was 20, just before she retired.

Her status, as a former world champion, allowed her a university education, once the system decided she had served her purpose. Her candour – she admitted this week that the state took 85 per cent of her earnings – is an indication of a quiet revolution, fuelled by nascent social media.

There are still Orwellian echoes of authoritarianism – Chinese athletes, coaches and administrators involved in the Olympic badminton match-fixing scandal were, to use a chilling official phrase, "educated" – but the new generation are emboldened by 250 million users of Weibo, micro-blogging sites. The deceit which distorted Wu Minxia's personal life prompted one to suggest: "Our values have been twisted because of our obsession with gold medals."

The organisers of the London Games inform us those gold medals consist of 95.5 per cent silver and 1.34 per cent gold, mined in Mongolia and Utah. They weigh up to 400g, and are 7mm thick. No one speculates whether the medals have been sealed by a mother's tears, or weighed down by a child's terror in the darkest hour, just before dawn.

Perhaps they should.

Thanks, but that victory is all yours

The Peoples' Medal, Katherine Grainger called it, in an immortal flash of inspiration. It was, of course, nothing of the sort.

Her gold medal, which defined half a lifetime spent in boats, was the consequence of a deeply personal process. She calls her first two silvers, from Sydney and Athens, her "happy medals". The third, in Beijing, scoured her soul.

There were times, when we talked on the grass outside the Bisham Abbey Performance Centre, when she questioned her very being.

It would have been so easy, too easy, to renounce rowing, and concentrate on the studies which will lead to a legal career. But she reckoned without herself.

Redemption came slowly. She rediscovered herself on the water, in early morning sessions with her coach, Paul Thompson. Like the best in his trade, he is a mixture of mentor and martinet.

Their human chemistry was compelling, just as it was when Grainger first sculled with Anna Watkins in 2010. There was an ease about them in and out of the boat, a fusion of technical precision and personality. They clicked.

Grainger's gold means everything. She deserves nothing less.

True Brit

Victoria Pendleton is another very British heroine. She could have raged at fate after being disqualified on Thursday, but accepted her responsibility. Her response was immediate, devastating, unforgettable. We'll miss her when she is gone.