The Controversial Strategy Behind China’s Global Sports Dominance

In 1988, China, a demographic giant, was just beginning to emerge on the international stage. At the Seoul Olympics, it won only five gold medals—a disappointing and humiliating performance for a country with over a billion people. But the story took a dramatic turn twenty years later at the Beijing Olympics in 2008, where China won 51 gold medals. In two decades, it multiplied its Olympic success tenfold. This spectacular progress was not the result of luck but of a relentless determination to transform failure into success.

China decided to reach the top at any cost, both in sports and economically. This is the foundation that can also be used to become rich. It’s essential to distinguish between being rich and being wealthy. Wealth is material, while richness is immaterial. When you’re buried, it won’t be with your wealth, but with your richness. This is where the story gets interesting. In life, we all have goals, a desire to grow, to reach the next level, but often there’s a gap, a chasm between our vision of the future and our present reality. We feel frustrated because it seems we’ll never get there. But China shows us that you can suffer humiliation, start from zero, and with time and effort, reach the heights of excellence.

The key idea here is to use humiliation and frustration as a driving force to seize growth opportunities. What’s remarkable about the Chinese strategy is that it’s a terrible system with an extremely high success rate.

So, how did the Chinese government identify future Olympic champions among over a billion people? The solution is as ingenious as it is systematic. Instead of searching for already trained athletes, they decided to shape them from a young age. China implemented an unprecedented talent detection system, where teams of recruiters scour the country, evaluating children aged 8 to 13. But their approach goes far beyond mere sports performance—they measure a multitude of parameters: height, arm span, flexibility, and even radiological exams to predict a child’s future physical development. This system doesn’t just identify general sports potential; it precisely determines the most suitable sport for each child. Long arms? Swimming. Flexibility and balance? Gymnastics. Quick reflexes? Table tennis.

This selection process, focusing on physical morphology, is something you can apply to your professional life. Instead of selecting a career based on market demand, choose it based on your mental morphology—your natural strengths and passions. The best way to determine where your talent lies is to identify your natural strengths. Once you identify your strengths, they will guide you like a compass towards the field where you will excel.

Once these young talents are identified, China has created a unique educational system to train them. Imagine a network of 3,000 sports schools across the country, hosting around 400,000 full-time student-athletes. These are not just regular schools with enhanced sports programs—they are intense training centers where sports take absolute priority. The young athletes live in boarding schools, seeing their families only a few times a year. Their daily routine is dominated by training. In theory, these institutions are supposed to balance sports and academic studies, but the reality is quite different. The focus is almost exclusively on sports training, often at the expense of general education.

This is the most disturbing part for me—sacrificing children’s lives for sports at the expense of their education. However, we can still extract lessons for our professional lives. The goal in life is balance, and one of the best ways to achieve balance is through versatility. Versatility is the ability to have complementary skills in different areas that can help you excel in your chosen field.

At the core of China’s strategy is an extraordinary training approach. Young athletes train an average of six hours a day, sometimes more. But it’s not just the duration that’s impressive—it’s the methodology. The Chinese approach emphasizes mastery of the fundamentals. Instead of rushing into the sport as a whole, Chinese coaches insist on endless repetition of basic movements. Take archery, for example: a trainee might spend their first year simply pulling the bowstring over and over to strengthen their muscles and perfect their technique. It’s only after mastering this fundamental movement that they’ll begin aiming at a target. This method demands incredible discipline and patience. It may seem extreme, even monotonous, but it yields undeniable results. By focusing on the basics, athletes develop exceptional technical mastery that gives them a competitive edge.

What this puts into perspective is the mastery of fundamentals. Mastering the basics provides a solid foundation. It’s like school—if you don’t master reading from the start, the rest of your education won’t matter. This is what I want you to do in your field: master the basics because once you do, everything else becomes creativity and freedom. You can do whatever you want. Mastering the basics requires two key elements: patience and discipline. Patience is essential because the fundamentals take time to master. Imagine children practicing ping pong strokes in the same way for a year, just to master the basics. The best way to nurture patience is to inject yourself with a dose of iron discipline, and the Chinese have this in their blood. Wherever I go in the world, I’ve never had anything negative to say about the Chinese when it comes to work—they have iron discipline, and that makes all the difference.

One of the most fascinating aspects of the Chinese approach is its targeting strategy. Instead of spreading their efforts across all Olympic sports, China made a bold choice to focus on a limited number of disciplines where they could excel. This strategy is based on thorough analysis. China identified the sports where it had the best chances of winning medals by considering several factors. It particularly favors less popular disciplines on a global scale, where competition is less fierce, and those that align best with its intensive training methods. This is how China has become a dominant force in sports like weightlifting, diving, table tennis, and badminton. These disciplines offer numerous medal opportunities and align well with the physical characteristics and training methods favored by the Chinese system.

This is one of my biggest flaws—the desire to do everything all at once. But the Chinese were smart—they said, instead of spreading ourselves thin, let’s concentrate our energy on niche areas, emerging fields, where there is little competition. We’ll bring excellence and increase our professionalism in each of these fields to become leaders. This is a strategy you can apply to the professional world: instead of spreading yourself too thin and trying to do everything at once, focus your energy on a niche or emerging field. I remember a marketing course where they talked about the blue ocean and the red ocean. The red ocean is where everyone is, where competition is fierce, while the blue ocean is the emerging or niche area, where competition is less intense, giving you time to develop and focus on your core business.

Behind the shine of Olympic medals lies a darker reality that is important to understand. Despite its apparent effectiveness, the Chinese sports system has a very low success rate. The numbers are telling: out of 900 students entering sports schools, only one will become an Olympic athlete. This 0.1% success rate means that 99.9% of young people who embark on this path will never reach the Olympic level. The consequences for those who don’t succeed are often dramatic. About 80% of athletes who don’t reach the top face major difficulties—unemployment, poverty, chronic health problems. Having devoted their youth to intensive training at the expense of general education, many find themselves ill-prepared to enter the traditional job market.

This harsh reality reminds us that the pursuit of excellence comes at a price. There’s a phrase I want you to remember for life: success is not guaranteed for everyone. I repeat, success is not guaranteed for everyone. I used to live in a world of imagination in my youth—a world where I thought success was guaranteed. But when I started traveling the world, especially in Asia and the Middle East, I realized something that hit me hard—this world is a jungle. A jungle of competition where not everyone can succeed, where the competition is fierce. The Chinese example demonstrates this—they select thousands of children across the country, but only a few will truly succeed, the rest will be discarded without education. That’s the part that I find poetic and distasteful.

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But let’s be honest, this world is a jungle, not a land of unicorns. If you live with the idea that you are in a world where everything is guaranteed, where you can achieve anything, where you are the best, then you are doomed. You need to be aware of the different forces at play in the world. When you have a project, remember that there are thousands of others with the same idea. The difference between those who succeed and those who fail is the full awareness of the forces at play. Another crucial element to success in a world of fierce competition is to find your passion, as we discussed at the beginning. Whatever project you undertake, you must ask yourself if you are passionate about it, if it aligns with your life goals, if it has a purpose. When you find your passion, you’ll be more resilient, more innovative, and above all, more satisfied with your achievements.

China’s journey to the top of the Olympic world is an extraordinary story of perseverance, discipline, and ruthless efficiency. However, it also raises significant ethical questions about the price of such success. For those who fail to reach the top, the consequences can be devastating. The Chinese sports system, with its high-stakes approach, reminds us that the pursuit of excellence often comes with significant sacrifices. It’s a reminder that while the glory of victory is celebrated, the cost to those who fall short is often hidden in the shadows.