04.10.06
Today’s Updates
What’s new: The website continues to grow and expand. We have a new template and a new page devoted to the many elite sporting events being hosted in China. The “Sports Business” page has also been expanded. The Shantou University students are hard at work editing their first articles on Chinese sports culture for the website. Look for them online later this week.
News briefs from the elite sports world today:
CHINA LAUREUS AWARDS: Liu Xiang was the big winner at China’s 2006 Laureus awards. He was named the best male athlete in China, and also China’s most popular athlete. This week, CNN’s “Talk Asia” news program has been featuring a lengthy and substantive interview with the 2004 Olympic gold medalist, one of his country’s brightest hopes for Olympic gold in 2008. Other winners at the Laureus Awards were figure skaters Zhang Dan and Zhang Hao, silver medalists in the pairs event at the 2006 Olympic Winter Games in Turin, Italy, and diver Guo Jingjing, named the best female athlete in China. See the Xinhua story for more details on this event. Click here for more information on the Laureus World Sport Awards.
SWIMMING: Xinhua has written a story summarizing the results of the FINA 8th World Short-Course Swimming Championships, which wrapped up yesterday in Shanghai. Among the Chinese medalists were Wu Peng (gold, men’s 200m butterfly, championship record of 1:52.36), Qi Hui (gold, women’s 200m breaststroke, 200m and 400m individual medley), and Yang Yu (women’s 200m freestyle).
BASKETBALL: The Shanghai Daily reports today that troubled Chinese basketball star Wang Zhizhi, the first Chinese to play in the NBA, is returning home today. Controversy dogged Wang during his NBA tenure in part because of his refusal to return home during the NBA’s summer breaks to play for the Chinese national team. He is quoted in the article as saying that he deeply regrets his mistakes and looks forward to playing for China again. Is this the first step towards a rehabilitation for Wang’s image so that he can be groomed to play for the Chinese team in the 2008 Olympics? Stay tuned. For more information on Wang, check out this article from Time magazine, written before Wang’s decision to return to China.
ICE HOCKEY: The Des Moines Register reports today on American ice hockey player Guan Wang, whose father Anfu was for many years an ice hockey player in his native city of Harbin, China. The younger Wang (who has Americanized his name by placing his given name first) is the youngest member of the Bantam Tier I team at the private Shattuck-St. Mary’s School in Faribault, Minnesota, which specializes in developing elite hockey players. Ice hockey may not be the first sport that comes to mind when we think about China’s elite sports program, but it’s a big sport with a potentially huge future as more and more Western sports organizations bring their considerable clout to developing sports in China.