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China To End Gold Medal Fixation; Investigation Condemns 'Blind Pursuit' Of Success

China’s graft fighters added gold medals to their growing list of out-of-favor “bling,” after an investigation into the country’s sports administrator condemned the “blind pursuit” of athletic success, according to Tom Mitchell of the FINANCIAL TIMES. Medal counts ranking provincial teams at the country’s '17 quadrennial games "will be scrapped in response to the audit" by China’s corruption watchdog, which has been "spearheading President Xi Jinping’s anti-corruption campaign." The move "brings a prodigious medal haul -- not least a total of 88 in the 2012 Summer Olympics," 38 of them Gold -- into the dragnet of China’s biggest anti-corruption purge since at least '76. Given the not-uncommon coupling of sports and corruption globally "it was perhaps only a matter of time" before Xi’s task force turned its attention to medals. The State General Administration of Sports "will also abolish the practice of rewarding provincial teams and coaches for their medal hauls at the Asian and Olympic Games." Instead, it will now put more weight on “multiple criteria including public participation in sports and cost efficiency of public sports investments." Athletics experts said that Gold Medals "were not the problem so much as the lengths coaches and athletes were willing to go for them." Tan Jianxiang, a sports professor at South China Normal University said, “It is not wrong to focus on Gold Medals in competitive sports, the essence of which is to jump higher, run faster and be stronger. But they shouldn’t be connected to sports officials’ promotions or make them richer. The value of Gold Medals has been twisted" (FT, 1/27).

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