Jason Barbacovi's Me and Chairman Mao

Medalheads

Mark my words: China is going to clean up at the 2008 Summer Olympics, but not for the reasons you think. Sure, those particular Olympics are going to be held in Beijing, so they'll have the home court, field, track, pool, mat and whatever else I've forgotten advantage, but that's not why. It's also not because China has, over the past two Summer Olympics—I'd tell you where they were held, but honestly I forget about them the moment they end and sometimes even before—progressively increased their overall medal count. At the 2004 Olympics, for instance, China was not only third in overall medals, but were actually second in gold medals won, only three behind the USA, and everyone knows we always win the most medals at the Summer Olympics. Well, at least we do now that the USSR has ceased to exist. So yes, apparently Reagan did give us something besides Oliver North, soaring deficits, and voodoo economics—who would have thought?

However, while China's recent medal surge is certainly notable, it's not quite as impressive as you might initially think. Why? Because a lot of those medals are in sports that don't really count, things like badminton and ping-pong, where the Chinese tend to dominate. And for those of you who would argue with me about the sporting merit of badminton and ping-pong, do you really want to take the position of defending either of those activities as Olympic-caliber sports? Really? I didn't think so. Take badminton: any alleged "sport" that prominently features something referred to, correctly mind you, as a shuttlecock and not as some sort of ongoing joke simply does not deserve to be an Olympic event. I mean, do you really want your kid to spend the entire summer talking about how much he loves whacking his or—even better—his friend's shuttlecock? I didn't think so.

As far as ping-pong is concerned, anything that can be played in a bar while drinking is not a sport. You know, like ping-pong, which can in fact be played under such conditions, although it should not be unless you are unable to play pool, darts, air hockey, Golden Tee video golf (any year), or snooker, which I don't actually know how to play but is still better than ping-pong, since it doesn't feature three seconds of what can only charitably be described as action followed by thirty seconds of crawling around on your hands and knees like a busy hooker at a bachelor party while looking for the fucking ball, which has naturally rolled underneath the least convenient object in the bar, be that the stage, the jukebox, or the table full of bikers in the corner who were a bit too rough for the Hell's Angels and who you just know have been debating the merits of beating the crap out of you, possibly literally, for the better part of the night—rightly so, I might add—because you've been playing ping-pong instead of doing something else, even if that something else was sitting on a stool drinking bottles of overpriced, under-flavored European lager while watching a WNBA game. Well, maybe not that bad, but you get the idea.

But back to my point, which is that China is going to kick some serious ass at the next summer games, and not because they happen to be in Beijing, the still-beating heart of Red China, or because it’s the natural culmination of some sort of medal-winning trend. No, China will vault to the top of the medal tables because of one thing: the tracksuit. Seriously, tracksuits? Seriously. To paraphrase Gertrude Stein, who was paraphrasing Shakespeare, who was either paraphrasing someone else or who didn't really exist and was actually Christopher Marlowe, a tracksuit is a tracksuit is a tracksuit. Sure, in China it might be a cheap knockoff of an overpriced legitimate one from Nike or Puma or Adidas—both would, of course, be made in China, like pretty much everything else—but it's still a tracksuit. And as I said, a tracksuit is a … never mind.

The thing is that while all tracksuits may not be created equal, they all serve the same primary function. And no, it's not simply a suit you wear while running on a track, although that is certainly one very literal thing you can do in it. I prefer to embrace a broader definition however, as in something you can wear either on your way to or while practicing pretty much any sort of athletic endeavor, from actual track and/or field to basketball to gymnastics to swimming to diving to everything up, down, around, and between. Except, of course, ping-pong and badminton, which are not actually sports, as was previously established.

What, you might quite rightly be asking, does this have to do with anything? Good question. The reason it has anything to do with anything is that the standard school uniform in China seems to be the aforementioned tracksuit. That's right, all across China, from Beijing to Guangzhou, from Shanghai to Xi'an, hundreds of millions of children—possibly more children than the entire population of the US, mind you—are running around all day long in tracksuits. And, as far as I can tell from talking to a number of Chinese people, they've been wearing tracksuits for years: since the early seventies at least and possibly before then, although since my half-hearted attempt to Google up an answer one afternoon met with complete and utter failure, we'll never know for sure. However, for all I know the first thing Mao did after he finished waving his little red book around and proclaiming the birth of the People's Republic of China from the top of Tiananmen Gate in October 1949 was institute an all-tracksuit, all-the-time policy for every school-aged child in China. I mean, probably he didn't, but you never know.

Now, as far as school uniforms go, I suppose tracksuits are as good as anything. Personally, I go for the Catholic schoolgirl look because, in general, I prefer hot girls who are either eighteen or at least look like they are wearing slightly higher than knee-length plaid skirts. But putting aside my perverted and, as I age, increasingly disturbing personal fetishes, I have to admit that the tracksuit is a more sensible uniform, if only slightly. So the question then becomes why the tracksuit? Why, out of every possible uniform combination—from the previously discussed Catholic schoolgirl look (which, granted, would be odd in a communist state with no religion whatsoever) to the standard shirt and tie to stylish yet sensible green Mao shirts, complete with mandarin collars, for everyone—did they choose the tracksuit? Cost? Uniformity? Availability? Ease-of-use? No, no, no, and no, although I must admit that uniformity does make some sense, since that does tend to be a desirable quality in a uniform.

So why then? The answer is obvious: to get ready for the Olympics. Why else wear a tracksuit if not to get ready for an athletic event? That is, after all, the raison d'êtré of the tracksuit. And why have every kid in the country wear a tracksuit unless you are getting ready for an athletic event that will involve the entire nation, like ... wait for it … the Olympics? Let's face it, it just makes sense. And for those of you who think that's insane, that there's no way every child in China has been wearing a tracksuit for thirty-odd years, if not more, in order to get ready for the 2008 Summer Olympics, which China didn't even know it would be hosting until a few years ago, I say this: you are totally, completely, and utterly wrong.

Granted, there's no possible way Mao could have known way back whenever that those particular Olympics would be held in Beijing, I'll give you that much. He was infallible, after all, not prescient. However, what you may not be aware of is that China was hoping that the 1940 Olympics would be held in Shanghai; they even built an entire stadium to show they could handle hosting such an event.1 And sure, the entire thing was put on hold by that whole "Japan overrunning the country in the early late thirties" thing, but it just goes to show you they were thinking about it way back in the nebulously defined day, when Mao was still a spunky young up-and-comer from Hunan province with communist-style yellow stars in his eyes.

True, seventy years is a long time to get ready for a sporting competition you don't know you're going to have, one that's full of events people only care about for five or six days every four years—I'm looking at you, gymnastics—but I would argue that, on the contrary, it's just good, solid planning. And really, the Chinese are nothing if not patient. I mean, when you live in a country with over a billion people, you have to learn to wait. And wait. And wait. And wait. You get the idea.

You want a more concrete example? How about the Great Wall, although I guess that's more of a "set in stone" example now that I think about it. Did you know that the Chinese started their wall-building ways like two-hundred years before Jesus was born? I thought not. Of course, what we think of as the Great Wall—the wall that, in part, still stands today—was built later, mostly in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, but as far as I'm concerned the fact that they began so early simply shows some serious foresight, the kind that makes Prometheus seem like the type of guy who didn't check to make sure his zipper was up until after he got on stage. And not only that, but once the Chinese started (well, restarted) things in the thirteen hundreds, they really went for it, continuing to build for about two hundred years. Now that, my friends, is commitment. And yes, like the Manginot Line the entire thing was a gigantic waste of time and didn't work at all, but that's not the point.

No, he point is that they were willing to try, to commit to something for two centuries just to see how it worked out. Think about that: two-hundred years of blood, sweat, and tears—probably in that order—to prepare for an invasion they only thought might happen at some point in the future. And they've only been preparing for the Olympics via the tracksuit method for what, like thirty years? That's nothing. Less than nothing. Less than zero even, if you prefer writing that either subtly or not-so-subtly alludes to American pop culture in a very pomo way as if it were clever, despite the fact that it hasn't been for at least a decade and possibly more.

That being the case, I think that it is not only possibly but entirely probable that the Chinese tracksuit culture that may or may not—Mao or Mao not?—have been created by the Chairman himself at least thirty years ago is part of a carefully thought out plan to help prepare China to dominate the 2008 Summer Games, thereby allowing China to prove to the rest of the world that they have arrived as a force to be reckoned with, as if providing pretty much every Western country with cheaply made textiles, plastics, and electronic components that destroy huge sections of said countries' economies weren't proof enough. No, real proof apparently requires gold, or at least a thin veneer of gold slapped over a lesser substance, like nickel or zinc or whatever they hell it is the allegedly gold Olympic medals are actually made out of. Strange, I know, but we say tomato, they say ... God only knows. Something in Chinese, I suppose, which by virtue of being even less understandable than tomatoe only further proves my point. Or maybe it doesn't, it's actually a bit confusing. But it doesn't hurt my point, I'm sure of that.

Either way, come the summer of 2008, when for two-odd weeks you get up at all hours of the night to watch sports you normally don't care anything about, sports like synchronized swimming, rhythmic gymnastics, Greco-Roman wrestling, or even—God, Buddha, or whomever forbid— faux sports like ping-pong and badminton, don't be surprised when you see Chinese athletes winning gold after gold after gold. And the next day at work, tell your friends, coworkers, and whomever else is also getting up at all hours of the day and night to watch sports they normally don't care about that you aren't at all surprised by the Chinese domination. Then, when they ask why, tell them that it's because the Chinese have been preparing for this moment for years. Decades, even. Tell them that, in a way, the Chinese have been getting ready for the 2008 Olympics for literally thousands of years.

In short, tell them about the tracksuit.

1. If anyone out there can confirm (or deny) this, I'd be interested in hearing from
you—my only solid source for this is the book The Empire of the Sun. (return)