Word: sporting
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...incubating a huge pool of tender-aged athletes, China has struck gold particularly in sports like gymnastics, diving and table-tennis that the slender, lithe physique of the average Chinese tends to complement. China's table-tennis team swept all golds at both the Atlanta and Sydney Games?a dominance unmatched by any country in any other sport. But China's sports system has also been successful by deliberately focusing on Olympic events that were underfunded and unappreciated in the West. When China fully rejoined the Olympic movement in 1984, the country discovered that many women's sports were languishing...
...China has also entered the winners' circle by building up expertise in little-known sports that offer a profusion of Olympic medals. Shooting, which has 17 golds up for grabs, was targeted early on?and China's first Olympic gold came in the unheralded 50-m pistol event in 1984. In 1995, China noticed that the recently added Olympic sport of Taekwondo attracted few top-class athletes outside South Korea, and cobbled together the nation's first Taekwondo squad. Less than five years later, China won a gold medal in the discipline in Sydney...
...Beijing 2008, the country is concentrating on canoeing/kayaking, with its 48 Olympic medals, and baseball, even though China has never before fielded an Olympic baseball squad and hasn't qualified in the sport for this year's Games. The need to create insta-stars was what brought Xu Damin, a 16-year-old from China's northwestern Xinjiang province, to the Weilun school's Taekwondo program. "I'd never heard of Taekwondo before entering sports school," he says. "But now my whole life is dedicated to this sport." Dripping with sweat, he announces that he, like so many other sports...
...Judo events are once again expected to be dominated by Japan, which introduced the world to the sport at the 1964 Tokyo Games. Inoue, who is the captain of Japan's Olympic team, and Ryoko Tani?a ruthless martial-arts master who wears pink hair-ties?will lead the way. Meanwhile, South Korea is favored to excel in Taekwondo, although Taiwan and the rest of the world have been gaining ground since the sport debuted as a medal event in 2000. Olympic boxing can always count on a contingent of tiny tough guys from Thailand; 2003 world champ Somjit Jongjohor...
...TAEKWONDO Japan will always have some of the best judo masters in the world, but their pre-eminence pales when compared with South Korea's supremacy in Taekwondo. Even though the sport has eight weight classes in the Olympics, each qualifying country is allowed to send only four athletes at most, presumably so Koreans can't monopolize the medal stands. For most South Korean Taekwondo fighters, then, the real challenge isn't just earning the gold: it's defeating fellow countrymen to qualify for the Olympics in the first place. Four years ago, for example, heavyweight Moon Dae Sung missed...