Rowing is unfamiliar to most Chinese, but their national team, in the gym and on the water, is among the world’s best. More Photos >
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By JULIET MACUR
Published: June 1, 2008
QIANDAO LAKE, China — When Igor Grinko, a former Soviet coach with an impressive résumé, agreed to take over the Chinese rowing team four years ago, Olympic officials outlined their expectations with a simple equation: one gold equals 1,000 silvers.
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Doug Kanter for The New York Times
The Coach China’s coach, Igor Grinko, once led the Soviet and U.S. teams. “Silver? It means nothing here; you might as well finish last,” he said. More Photos »
“Silver? It means nothing here; you might as well finish last,” Grinko said. “Coaches like me come, help them win gold medals, or we are fired.”
In anticipation of China’s debut as an Olympic host, officials here have seized the opportunity to prove their country is a world power in sports. Rowing is at the heart of China’s plan to capture, for the first time, more gold medals than any other nation at the Olympic Games.
Grinko, 62, called it a priority for the Chinese to focus on sports like rowing that offer many gold medals, unlike basketball and soccer. The Summer Games in Beijing include 14 rowing events — 14 chances to for China to win gold and prove itself on home soil.
China has spent millions — perhaps billions — on personnel and infrastructure to accelerate growth in medal-rich sports in which it has had little success. About 20 prominent foreigners, including Grinko, have been hired to coach national teams in various sports, and more are coaching in provinces that feed those teams.
“They are doing some crazy things to win gold medals, and they believe they will win many,” said Grinko, who was also a United States national team coach from 1991 to 2000. “U.S.? Russia? Some other countries? No problem to beat them. This is their thinking.”
Grinko, a gray-haired, steel-blue-eyed master of corny jokes that fall flat with the Chinese, is known for his brutal training regimen. His favorite word is suffer, he said with a goofy laugh. In the nine years before Grinko joined the United States team, his Soviet rowers won 14 Olympic and world championship medals, including eight gold.
Here, he is the uncompromising leader of the magnificent $10 million government-financed athletic complex on the banks of what is called Thousand Island Lake. This spring, The New York Times was granted rare access to this training ground, including its 11-story main building, which rises from orange groves surrounded by mountains about 250 miles southwest of Shanghai.
China has won four medals in rowing, none gold, since its first Olympics in 1932. But suddenly, in a sport unfamiliar to most Chinese, the rowers have become a team to beat at the Beijing Games. China has qualified more boats than all but 4 of the 57 countries on the Olympic rowing roster so far.
Since 2006, Chinese rowers have won 18 gold medals at world championships and World Cup events, more than double the number of victories in the previous three years. At a World Cup regatta last year in Amsterdam, China stunned some leading teams by taking home 10 medals. It won five golds in the 14 events contested in the Olympics.
Some rivals say they became suspicious because the rowers had improved so fast, and because over the last 20 years, Chinese athletes had been snared in widespread doping scandals. After Amsterdam, Grinko’s cellphone began ringing. “Your team must be doping,” Grinko recalled former rowing colleagues telling him. “What kind of drugs are they on?”
Mike Teti, the coach of the United States men’s rowing team, said, “We know they are cheating, but there’s nothing we can do about it.” But Cui Dalin, the vice minister of the General Administration of Sport of China, insisted that the host team would be “clean, very clean.”
Eight years ago, as China was vying to win its bid for the Olympics, officials like Cui began a government-financed effort called the 119 Project. Its purpose was to improve performances in the medal-heavy sports — track and field, swimming, rowing, canoe/kayak and sailing — in which the Chinese have been weak. The plan was named after the 119 gold medals awarded in those sports at that time. Other nations’ Olympic committees also attempt to win medals by allocating extra resources to certain sports. But none have been as elaborate, well financed and daunting as China’s plan.
“No secrets, no mysteries going on here,” Grinko said in a heavy Russian accent. “They’re just doing this like the East Germans did in the 1970s and ’80s.”
The Medal Count
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