BEIJING — Air rifle athlete Du Li was considered a shoo-in to win China's first gold medal in the Beijing Olympics on Saturday. Buckling under the pressure of 1.3 billion expectant Chinese, she choked.
The mostly Chinese crowd gasped after Du failed to get near the bull's-eye in the first shot of the final round. After her fifth-place finish, Du fled through a crowd of reporters, tears streaming from her eyes.
"I wasn't fully prepared for the pressure of competing at home," she said.
Determined to squeeze every last gold medal out of the Beijing Olympics in hopes of knocking the U.S. off the top shelf, China has ramped up spending on sports psychology. (The exact figure is a state secret.) But psychologists say the Games are so integrally linked with national glory and pride that athletes can feel overwhelmed.
Later Saturday, shooting coach Wang Yifu told Chinese reporters that team leaders wanted an emergency meeting of athletes to help ease the psychological pressure, before adding that it was also to "improve results and get more gold medals for the nation."
In recent months, China's elite sports system has set up counseling websites, introduced online therapy and promoted computer-aided relaxation techniques. The Communist state is promoting yoga and offering special music, meditation, hypnosis, uplifting stories and films deemed psychologically soothing, including "Forrest Gump."
But old habits die hard. Coaching in China has traditionally been rough, tough and, some critics say, borderline abusive with an emphasis on relentless martial training.
Slogans on the walls of training camps tell the story: "The Motherland Is Above Everything; Strike for Gold in the Olympics," reads one for the shooting team, according to the blog www.hecaitou.net "> www.hecaitou.net . "Pressure each other. Pressure yourself," reads another for the gymnastics team. "There will be no champion if one does not go through the ultimate pressure."
"The coaches can be very dictatorial, issuing orders to athletes without explaining why," said Chu Yuede, a professor of sports psychology at the Beijing Sports University who is working with the shooting team. "Some also get angry with us and say we're meddling, that athletes should just follow their orders."
Some of their colleagues share the blame, psychologists concede, by focusing on the athletes and not the coaches in their eagerness to work with the sports celebrities.
