Björndalen, Lange and Co. should fix it
“This is especially the case in new sports where there is a lack of in-house expertise. There they have to hire foreign coaches to successfully build the sport from the ground up.”
For the Winter Games in Beijing, China has also secured the services of a number of prominent coaches and ex-athletes, including the biathlon legends Ole Einar Björndalen and Darya Domracheva and the German record Olympic champion in bobsleigh, André Lange.
Machata: coaching job in China an exciting challenge
Before Lange took over the coaching job in China, it belonged to another German. Manuel Machata, former world champion in 2-man bobsleigh, coached the Chinese bobsleigh team for three and a half years up until the Pyeongchang Games.
“Building a completely new sport in a country I didn’t know was an adventure and an exciting challenge“, says Machata. Of course, he had thought about the human rights situation in China beforehand, but he had good experiences there. “Away from the sport you can certainly rate it differently.”
Machata is now head coach in Italy. “I was traveling nine months a year. It’s better for the family now.“The long time away from home, plus language barriers, these are not the only challenges that foreign trainers face in China. Often, their protégés have never been on skis or sat on a sled, so Machata and Co. start from scratch had to.
Corona does the rest. “At the beginning the training conditions were very good, but since the outbreak of the pandemic it has become difficult“, says Wolfgang Schädler, who has been training the Chinese luge team since 2015. The fact that they missed the entire past season due to the corona virus also doesn’t help in building up a young, still inexperienced team.
Strict hierarchies pose problems for trainers
The iron training regime and the strict hierarchies in China also repeatedly pose problems for foreign trainers. “The Chinese sports system is very regimented, very structured and shaped by history. It was difficult to convince them of new ideas. So we had to teach them our sport first before we could really start our work as coaches“, reported Painwho is now active in Austria.
In addition, there are high expectations of the team, the pressure to succeed on athletes, coaches and officials is enormous. “The home advantage is so great that anything that doesn’t lead to a gold medal is considered a failure in the eyes of the Chinese sports authorities“, means Pain.
Schädler points out that it is impossible to work your way up to the top of the world in such a short time, especially in technically demanding sports such as tobogganing. He made this clear to his superiors from the start.
China’s plan doesn’t always work out
Nevertheless, thanks to foreign expertise and a lot of luck, it could be enough to win a medal in skeleton, bobsleigh or biathlon. In other sports, however, China’s plan does not work.
The participation of the Chinese men’s national ice hockey team, although automatically qualified for the Olympic tournament as hosts, was on the brink, as there was great fear of embarrassment on the part of the world association. And that despite Italian coaches and a number of naturalized North American players.
So the question is how sustainable China’s winter sports efforts are. According to Machata, all this will only make sense if the country succeeds in developing its own trainers. “Otherwise they are caught in a perpetual vicious cycle in which you have to keep bringing coaches from abroad.”
Status: 01/26/2022, 10:39 am