The Olympics we don't want to see.

Last night, after I finally got home from work after being stuck for an hour behind a wreck on 290 (thanks Houston drivers) I was watching the Olympics when diving came on.

Full disclosure: I'm not much of a fan of diving. It's a judged athletic competition that makes no sense to me how they score it, and it's pretty much a snooze-fest unless a dive goes horribly wrong.  And even then I'm not happy because I don't want to see any athlete hurt.

But I was struck by something one of the announcers said during the lead-up to a dive by eventual gold medalist Quan Hongchan  If you've never seen Quan dive, she is amazing. She's only 17 (she's been competing at the top level since age 13) and she rarely misses. As a matter of fact, the Chinese are so good at diving their only true competition any more are themselves.

But, this comment, by former American Diver Laura Wilkinson I believe (and if I'm wrong I'm sorry, I tuned in with the event already in progress) got me to thinking. Here's what she said:

"Quan was drafted into the Chinese diving academy at a young age. One of the benefits of that is that the State agreed to provide her mother, who was very ill, medical care for life"

The two announcers then went on to gush about how great that was, how nice it must be for her. In fact, her Wikipedia page, clearly written by the Chinese government by the way, talks about how much she "loves diving".

Uh-huh.

Read into this and it becomes a little bit clearer why China is so far ahead of everyone else in diving. 

They're conducting military-style drafts of athletes in certain events and training them up, for life, to do one thing. I'm guessing, at a very young age, means that they are "drafting" these kids into the academies at somewhere between 4-6 years old?

One imagines that life in the academy means LIFE in the academy. You don't see your family, you live on the compound and you train and train and train.  Remember in the Acolyte (Disney's recently released, and fairly awful, Star Wars series) where the Jedi were slammed as monsters for doing that to younglings?

But we glorify it during the Olympics. The Chinese government basically forced a child to dedicate her entire early life to a sport, or face the prospect of her very ill Mom not receiving the medical care that she needs.

In many pools in America, kids under the age of 12 aren't even allowed on the 10m platform for safety concerns. How many young Chinese kids are getting injured (or worse) by being forced up onto those platforms at an early age?  Sadly, we won't know this because China would never let that information out.

Look, it could be none. The Chinese diving academy could be the safest environment possible. I'm not suggesting that it's not. What I am suggesting is that we don't know. Nor do we know much about the Chinese Olympic sports program at all.

We know the Chinese swimmers dope and we know that they are also very good at Table Tennis and Badminton. They seem to be pretty good at shooting BB guns. (what else would you call air pistol and air rifle?) Outside of that however we know very little about how they prep and train their athletes.

I know what you're going to say here. "Those who live in glass houses should not cast stones" and you are right. America has not been a shining example of sport in the past. We have our horrific ladies gymnastics scandal, several Track & Field athletes who have doped, and athletes who have copped, usually after the Olympics, to horrific tales of physical and mental abuse.

The difference is none of this was State sponsored. And in almost every case the bad actors have been caught, and either shamed, stripped of medals or (in some cases) criminally prosecuted. Also, we learned lessons. In ladies gymnastics we certainly learned that importing coaches using training techniques and methods that originated behind the Iron Curtain is not the way to go.

Look, the Chinese government and people seem to be OK with this system. As Americans we probably need to deal with this and let them run their own shop. That doesn't mean that we should not condemn the doping, and it's very fair to ask questions when any Chinese athlete does something that seems too good to be true at this point, but we cannot lecture them on how they run their shop.

What we can do is to ensure that we don't try to run our shop that way, even if it means that in sports such as diving we're just always going to be a few steps behind. The Chinese divers are amazing. And, by all accounts, China is breaking no rules in making them that way. But America needs to look at what we know is happening to make them that way, and decide whether or not we want to play that game.

My thought is a hard no.