China, Russia to battle USA

Associated Press

DENVER

Starting a year from now in London, many more Olympic medal celebrations could take on a different look and sound: Less “Star Spangled Banner,” more “National Anthem of the Republic of China.” Less red, white and blue, American style, more white, blue and red, Russian style.

No longer will the race to win the most medals be a race for second, behind the United States, which dominated for decades in the aftermath of the fall of the Soviet Union.

“It’s an interesting landscape out there,” Alan Ashley, the U.S. Olympic Committee’s chief of sport performance said Tuesday. “Some of these other nations are pouring enormous resources into this. Governments are behind them. They’re very serious contenders. That does keep me up at night sometimes.”

Anyone who follows the Olympics knows the USOC leadership has mastered the art of lowering expectations. This time, though, there’s some validity behind it.

Luciano Barra of Italy, globally respected as one of the top predictors of how the medals table would turn out, put out his latest projections in May. It called for Russia to win the medal count with 90, followed by China with 88 and the United States with 75. In 2008, the United States won 110 — 10 more than second-place China.

“The amount of investment going on by the top 15 or 20 national organizing committees, the amount they’ve increased, it’s startling,” said Steve Roush, who held Ashley’s position at USOC through 2008 and now is a senior consultant for TSE Consulting, which helps countries around the world build up their Olympic programs.

Back in 2001, when it won the right to host the 2008 Olympics, China poured billions into infrastructure, coaching and development for a country with a population of 1.3 billion that had barely been a blip on the Olympic radar until 1984. The goal was to be a formidable power at the games they hosted. But the project was not designed to end there, and it hasn’t. With the 2011 world swimming championships still in progress in Shanghai, China has won 20 medals, to five for the United States.

“So many hosts have had this post-host slump, because they invest money in individual athletes and really focus on hosting, with not a lot of vision for future,” Roush said. “But because of the magnitude of their investment, China said, ‘We not only want to do well as a host in ‘08, but we want to establish a system.”’