Cathal Dennehy: China chasing even more gold with school sports system investment

The roots of China’s sports system are found in the Soviet model, which could be best summed up as throwing a bunch of eggs against the wall and keeping the ones that don’t crack.

China’s sports school system has existed since 1955 but expanded after 1995, when the State General Administration of Sports released its ‘Plan for Olympic Glories’, which restructured the elite training system and vastly increased investment in talent pipeline structures.

The first sound you hear are the thumps – teenage bodies flipped by their peers and crash-landing on padded mats, the thuds reverberating around the giant hall.

The students are 15 or 16, girls paired with girls, boys with boys, all of them decked out in blue and white judogi uniforms, taking turns practising rapid-fire leg sweeps while simultaneously shunting their partner’s upper body in the opposite direction, trying to slam them on their back, the flying judokas spinning as they fall, trying to avoid that fate.