Baller 21

Operation Yao Ming, Beijing Olympics

by Chris Harvey on 07/31/08

Operation Yao Ming: The Chinese Sports Empire, American Big Business, and the Making of an NBA Superstar, written by Brook Larmer, is a fascinating book that I just finished reading.

The story begins with a groundingbreaking introduction into the forbidden kingdom of China and the communist-style sports system that Yao Ming was “drafted” into. Yao’s basketball playing parents, like many other athletes, were paired up at the urging of the dictatorial sports officials that were driven to create a generation of athletes that could compete with the rest of the world and bring glory to their nation.

As Yao began to grow into his 7′6” frame and develop into one of China’s top basketball players, the story takes many twists and turns into the complicated East-West tug-of-war battle over athletes and how American big businesses were trying to get their foot in the door of a country with 1.3 billion potential consumers.

There is a lot of hope and pressure that has been building for years in regards to the 2008 Beijing Olympics. Take a glimpse into the weight that is on a nation and a ball players shoulders:

“No moment will symbolize China’s stunning rise more potently than the 2008 Olympics. The Games’ long-awaited arrival in Beijing, coming a full century after YMCA missionaries first issued their challenge, will mark China’s return as a global superpower, a nation that has leaped from the darkness of the Cultural Revolution to the bright lights of the world’s center stage in a single generation. The Olympics have always been freighted with political meaning, and a national pride naturally surges in host countries. But predictably, given the size of its population and historical ambitions, China has taken it to another level.

The prestige of the nation, one-fifth of the world’s population, seems to hinge on that single fortnight in August 2008. By staging a successful Olympics that showcases the country’s “peaceful rise” (and erases a darker history), the leaders hope to prove to the world, and to their own people, that this truly is China’s century.

The star of this global coming-out party will, almost inevitably, be Yao Ming. Moreover, as Beijing prepares to dazzle the world with its development. the nations’s sport authorities seem eager to excel in basketball, a “big ball” sport with not only deep roots in the Middle Kingdom but also future import as the quintessential global game. Eighth place will not be good enough this time around. Chinese authorities are already promising the country’s first-ever men’s basketball medal in 2008, and the pressure will be on their 7′6” center to lead the way.”

As I posted on Twitter, I didn’t win the Yao Ming Foundation raffle, but I am still interested in seeing how the Beijing Olympics transpire, and how the basketball competition unfolds.

Anyone going to watch the Olympics? Any other great stories to watch this year?

C.Harv