Winning at all costs: put through their paces, children are doing punishing exercises to toughen them up. Children are trained at camps where the word ‘gold’ is hung on the wall to make them focus on success. Young boys and girls put through their paces at the Chen Jinglun Sports School, the Alma mater of Ye Shiwen. As a matter of fact, countries in the world create challenge and competition from each other. Instead, they should value the games from how it strengthen the relationship between countries, deliver peaceful message, human rights, healthy lifestyle etc instead of the Gold Medal itself.

According to her mother, Qing Dingyi, as quoted by the Chinese state media, little Ye ‘expressed a wish to become a swimmer at the tender age of seven’. In truth, trainers picked her out because she had an unusually masculine physique with extremely large hands and long limbs. These attributes at first thought best suited to a career in track and field.

After being whisked away from her modest two-bedroom apartment, in Hangzhou, a city of 6.2 million, and installed into the Chen Jingluin sports school, however, it was decided she would be best suited to swimming, and by 11 she had won her first major junior championship.

In swimming, as in most other Olympic sports, they enforce a regime so relentlessly harsh that it has been compared, by those few Western observers who have managed to penetrate the obsessive secrecy with which it is guarded, to that in some 19th-century prisons.

Only last January harrowing photographs were posted on the internet showing Chinese children crying in pain as they were put to work. In case they had forgotten why they were there, a large sign on the wall reminded them. ‘GOLD’ it said simply.

Winning at all costs

dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2181374