If you win a gold medal ...

[Atithee]

Yup, that has been my conjecture from Day 1. Until India becomes a prosperous nation (using GDP per capita as a proxy), one cannot expect beaucoup Olympic medals, let alone gold. Perhaps Asian games is a better measure of the change in dial. But even there, I think you will find the GDP per capita theory dominate.

There are plenty of studies around this. Of course, there are exceptions, but India is less likely to be one. For example, Want to Predict Olympic Champs? Look at GDP study listed the following variables to be a good predictor:

GDP per capita, total population, political structure (democratic, authoritarian, military or communist), climate (the number of frost days) and home-nation bias.

[prasen9]

Reminds me of a childhood joke in India. A father was motivating his son that if the child passed in his exams, he would get a bicycle. Upon child's query as to what would happen if he failed, the father quipped that the son would get a rickshaw instead!

The son should have failed. Got the rickshaw. Sold it. Bought a bicycle and enjoyed the rest of the money.

[achineseguy]

My take on the Chinese system is that their success is not based on the rewards and honor they bestow. Rather, it is their scouting and "forced" development of junior talent in sports schools and academies which determine the success of their sports especially in the Olympic sports.

There is a scouting system in my country, where kids are picked to attend sport trainings, or special sport schools. There is a large number of coaches, who are usually retired sportsmen or women, working at grass root level selecting talented kids. They become important when their players win titles.

This does show Soviet influence. At the same time, Chinese martial art, Peking Opera, acrobat have long tradition of training kids at very young age, like 5 or 6. These kids leave their parents and live with shifu, or masters until they graduate. When these two traditions meet and blend, you get the current system.

When the fast IT development in India caught attention of Deng Xiaoping some 30 years ago, this Chinese leader told the Minister of Education to 'begin with kids'.

It is interesting to note that the Chinese typically do better in the less widely played sports where their depth makes a bigger difference. Therefore, in general, they struggle to achieve equal success in soccer, tennis, track & field, swimming etc. where global competition has more depth (and yes, Li Na and Liu Xiang are examples of success here but they are more the exceptions rather than the rule).

I guess this has something to do with the length of history of these sports in China. Modern (men's) soccer has a history too short here, and sometimes it just takes time to catch up. Our women's soccer is pretty good, I guess that is because China started that roughly at the same time as in the other countries, and probably puts even more emphasis than these countries.

Chinese Olympic Committee often advises schools to add medal-worthy subjects. Schools often advise students to change to similar, but more medal-worthy majors, solely for the purpose of winning more medals. These subjects are otherwise unheard of here, and they are usually not played at all.

Do girls play soccer after school or when being bored of reading? No. But many high schools in China do have girl's soccer teams and they will convince some girls to take part in this sport. When girls play soccer, there aren't many cheer leaders - sad.