US$323,000, the ROC government's award money for a gold Olympic medal, is one of the highest in the world. So why has no one ever been able to claim it?
If you're having trouble tallying the number of ROC athletes who have won event Olympic medals, here's a hint--you will only need the fingers of one hand. Four individual athletes and one team have won Olympic medals, all in the Summer Games. Yang Chuan-kwang took a silver in the 1960 Rome Olympics for the decathlon, and Chi Cheng won a bronze medal in the women's eighty-meter hurdles at the 1968 Olympic Games in Mexico City. From then on, how ever, the Olympic drought lasted over a decade. No one earned any medals in Munich in 1972, pressure from China kept the ROC out of Montreal in 1976, and the ROC was one of the countries that boycotted Moscow in 1980. Something to do with the heat, perhaps? It seems not--although the ROC has competed in every Winter Olympics since Sapporo in 1972 (with the exception of Lake Placid in 1980), it has yet to win a single medal there.
Even the acknowledged successes seem somehow tainted. The ROC's Tsai Wen-i earned a bronze in men's 60kg-class weightlifting at the 1984 Los Angeles Olympiad, only to have some critics point out that the games had been boycotted by nearly every Communist country, nations whose markedly superior weight lifting teams would have shut Taiwan out of any chance of a medal had they attended. The so-called Chinese-Taipei baseball team captured a silver medal in Barcelona in 1992, but their triumph was overshadowed by the team's subsequent failure to qualify for the Olympics in Atlanta or Sydney. The 1996 Summer Games in Atlanta saw Chen Jing take a silver for table tennis, but there were those who whispered that the mainlander-turned-Taiwan resident had honed most of her talents in China before crossing the strait.
Although Taiwan has been able to make international headlines for its economic success and political liberation, it retains the lowest of profiles in the world's sports arena. At regional meets it does rather better, however. In the thirteenth Asian Games, held in Bangkok in 1998, the Chinese-Taipei team took home nineteen gold, seventeen silver, and forty-one bronze medals and placed sixth overall out of forty-one con tending countries. And this year, Taiwan may well have its best chance in decades to bring home an Olympic gold medal from Sydney, where taekwondo will be elevated from being a demonstration sport to the status of event. This has already earned the ROC many world championships, as well as five gold medals in the 1988 and 1992 Summer Olympics when it was still just a demonstration sport. Table tennis is another local strength, as is women's weightlifting, which, like taekwondo, becomes an official Olympic event in Sydney this year.
So what is being done to prepare the island's athletes for their best shot? As in the past, the government has asked the ROC Sports Federation, a semi-official organization, to train athletes for the Olympics and other world events at the Tsoying Training Center in southern Taiwan. The center was created in 1975, when the Ministry of Education (MOE) borrowed an area of Marine Corps land at Tsoying to use as a training center for the Montreal Olympics the following year. The ROC team went to Canada, although China mounted a successful bid to prevent it from competing. In 1976, the MOE reached an agreement with the military authorities to lease the land, and the Tsoying Sports Training Center was formally established. The center, sprawling over nearly fifteen hectares of land in Kaohsiung, is the island's leading facility for athletes in training for international events.
This place is a world apart from the other sports hubs dotted around the island, most of which are housed in physical education and sports colleges. But Liao Yu-hui, secretary-general of the ROC Sports Federation, admits that Tsoying falls short of what other advanced countries offer their best athletes. Since the federation does not own the land, it has no incentive to make--and pay for--much needed improvements. "By international standards, Tsoying still lags far behind," Liao says. The first thing he would like to see changed is for the center to acquire the land on which it operates, or move somewhere else. "It's too hot in Tsoying, and putting a sports center in an industrial city like Kaohsiung, teeming with air pollution, wasn't such a good idea," he says, adding that a move to the mountains would be best.
Because individual sports lack their own specially tailored training camps, most national team coaching takes place at Tsoying, or its smaller branch in Linkou, northern Taiwan. "Each sport should have its own special training center doubling as an international-standard competition arena, and the venue should be run by that sport's association," Liao says. But it will take more than improved facilities to raise standards. "We've got better facilities than the mainland, but their performance is much superior to ours," Liao says.
So what is wrong with Taiwan's athletes? The government's award money for a gold Olympic medal is one of the highest in the world, at NT$10 million (US$323,000). Why has no one come forward to claim it?
Perhaps the answer lies in the island's social structure. "All top-performing athletes have cooperative parents," says Tsai Ching-tung, a coach who has trained some of Taiwan's best swimmers. "I've worked with people who had a great build and lots of potential as first-rate swimmers. Unfortunately, lots of parents make their children quit halfway through the program, and I find that really depressing."
Taiwan's prosperity has made parents overly concerned about their children's futures, and training is seen by many of them as a waste of time. "Training can be very tough, and most of Taiwan's young people can't take it," says Wu Chun-che, a specialist at the Sports Excellence Department of the National Council on Physical Fitness and Sports (NCPFS). "Times have changed since the disciplined days of our agricultural past," Tsai grumbles. "Today it's all about feelings."
This has much to do with the perception here that choosing a sports career is a dead end, making it hard for coaches to talk parents into letting their children set aside time for sports practice. "I've been scouting around at junior high schools, but parents and teachers aren't very receptive," says Chung Yung-chi, a weight lifting coach. "They say children need to focus on the exams that will get them on to the next stage, and that means a lack of fresh blood in the sports arena."
The shortage of new talent is particularly noticeable with table tennis. "In Taiwan, it takes about ten years to produce a great player," says Hsu Rong-chan, a former national table-tennis player and currently a coach. "Considering the general attitude toward sports here, that's not bad." Most players from the main land, Taiwan's major rival in this field, peak at twenty, while local athletes tend to be much older. "Mainlanders are more willing to devote themselves to sports, because their athletes are better taken care of than ours," Hsu says. "As long as they reach a certain standard, they get a regular stipend from the government."
With that contrast Taiwan, where incentives for parents and younger athletes to devote time and energy to sports are few and far between. "A lot of athletes think, 'Why should I train so much? I'll just end up jobless in the long run,'" says Lin I-ying, an archer who will compete in her third Olympiad this September. "Those who've won a medal in the Asian or Olympic Games don't have to worry about life after sport, but most do, including me."
As in the United States, becoming a high-school athletic champion can facilitate entrance into higher education. One problem with this in Taiwan, however, is that after athletes enter college, usually a sports -related school, they become lax about training. "They work extra hard in sports just because it seems easier than hitting the books to get a college place," says Wu Chun-che of the NCPFS. "You find that some of these students performed better in high school competitions than they do now at their collegiate meets."
The biggest complaint from top coaches, however, is not about the athletes they train, but about having to spend their own money to do it. "If I assessed the benefits I get from coaching in purely financial terms, I'd be in the red from day one," says Tsai Ching-tung, who makes most of his income from giving swimming lessons to children. Most coaches with an Olympic athlete to train must take a leave of absence from their day jobs to work at Tsoying. Coaches are paid NT$600 (US$19.35) a day at the center if they take paid leave from their jobs, and NT$3,000 (US$97) if not. "This kind of thing really affects our morale," says Hsu Rong-chan, who started to coach at Tsoying in March after taking leave from his job as a table-tennis coach at a government-run financial institution. "This is supposed to be a training camp for big international events. Why do they think they can get away with paying me NT$600 per day just because I'm getting a salary from somewhere else?"
Paltry pay seems to be the biggest complaint coaches have. "We're asked to come here because we're good. So what's wrong with asking for a raise?" says Weng Rong-kuen, a badminton coach at Tsoying. "Rest is an essential, integral part of training, but on holidays we don't get paid. I sometimes wonder whether government officials know the first thing about sports training."
NCPFS's Wu Chun-che counters that the government is well aware of the salary issue and is ready to raise their pay. At the same time, he points out that the government is not made of money, and this has an impact on the quality of sports training at all levels, including schools where prospective athletes are being cultivated. According to Liao Yu-hui, the government can only afford to fund a handful of full-time coaches in schools, where 95 percent of coaching jobs are held by ordinary PE teachers. It is thus hardly surprising to find that many school training programs are lamentably deficient.
If money is a problem, why not turn to the private sector? Liao feels that Taiwanese businesses are not really interested in sponsoring sports. "The US Olympic Committee and sports associations rely on the private sector's financial support a great deal, but in Taiwan the government plays the key financial role," says Wu. "Some coaches and athletes grouse that the government doesn't do enough for them, but in fact it picks up quite a lot of the burden."
Many countries devote extensive resources to research into sports-related issues but, according to Liao Yu-hui, Taiwan is not among them. It started late and still lags behind. The Tsoying center has had a sports science research training department since 1987, but a lack of full-time employees at the center coupled with some coaches' insistence on more traditional training methods has stunted progress. Outside of Tsoying, five academic institutions offer coaching science courses, the principal one being the Institute of Coaching Science at the National College of Physical Education and Sports, established in 1994.
In one area at least, Taiwan takes sports research with the utmost seriousness. Not only are its athletes rigorously screened for drugs, they are educated to be aware of the harm illicit substances can cause. Emphasis is placed on avoiding over-the-counter medications that may contain prohibited drugs. This is an important issue, because several of Taiwan's athletes have tested positive after taking medicine for colds. Now, according to Liao, they are more careful.
Taiwan's long-term future as a sporting powerhouse, even in those select sports where it traditionally excels, is gloomy. Local Olympic hopefuls such as Chen Jing, the table-tennis Olympic medalist, and Li Feng-ying, women's weightlifting world champion, are actually from mainland China, where they received the bulk of their training, and pessimists warn that Taiwan only looks strong in taekwondo because other countries have yet to take up that sport and run with it. There are already signs that this may be true. In the 2000 World Cup Taekwondo Championships, Taiwan ended up without any gold medals for the first time in a decade. The mainland, a rising power in this sport, grabbed two golds. And although Taiwan brought home nineteen gold medals in the thirteenth Asian Games, only four--one in swimming and three in taekwondo--were for events that will be formally recognized in Sydney this year. The rest were won for "lesser" sports such as golf, billiards and bowling, all of which are excluded from the Summer Games.
So if Taiwan manages to bring home some metal from Sydney later this year, it will not be on account of its dedicated sports environment. Many observers believe that the island would do well to turn down the heat under its Olympic team and concentrate instead on areas of proven if less high-profile excellence, such as volleyball. In the 1998 Asian Games, the ROC men's volleyball team defeated Japan, usually a top con tender, ending up in third place. Taiwan also won its bid to host the Baseball World Cup in November next year, a sign that the island is slowly overcoming its lack of international-quality venues. Sixteen of the world's best baseball teams will compete in Taiwan and hopefully rekindle the island's passion for the sport, despite its tarnished reputation.
Last April, the government announced a scheme administered by the NCPFS that will reward athletes for their performances at events ranging from high-school competitions right up to the Olympics. Not unlike a frequent flier program, accumulated points measure how much prize money an athlete will get. Not only that: the more points athletes win, the more likely they are to land steady jobs once they retire from active competition. For example, after acquiring two gold medals and one silver in the Universiade, or 500 points, an athlete is qualified to apply for a job with the NCPFS and thereafter is free from worries about life after sport.
It may take years before Taiwan's athletes can capture the spirit of the 1960s, when they did not need fortuitous boycotts or an influx of mainland Chinese blood to garner victories. Will the next decade witness a resurgence? One would need an Olympic gold medal in fortune-telling to tell.