Accelerated naturalizations were not enough: Chinese hockey players lost all their matches in the preliminary round. But China is not the only country recruiting foreign athletes.
© AFP
Born in Michigan in 1989, Jeremy Smith is China’s goalkeeper.
The president of the International Ice Hockey Federation (IIHF), French-Canadian Luc Tardif, warned: “Seeing a team be beaten 15-0 is not good for anyone, neither for China nor for the ice hockey” (quoted by “Le Monde”). The message got through. Afraid of ridicule, China has decided to naturalize a form of honor: a few months before the Olympics, eleven Canadians, three Americans and a Russian have obtained a Chinese passport. Their mission, which they have accepted, dubbed the “Kunlun option”, is to avoid the snub to the Chinese hockey team, ranked 32nd in the world, while the Olympic calendar has destined them for opponents as frightening as Canada and the United States, with 5 and 8 goals respectively conceded, without having managed to score a single one.
That’s why Jake Chelios became Jieke Kailiaosi, Brandon Yip, Ye Jinguang and Ty Shultz, Zheng Enlai… In the China team, there are ten players left who were born in the country, not to mention that some of them grew up in hockey lands, like Canada. On the ice, the Middle Empire relies on regarding fifteen mercenaries. If we count the two teams, male and female, there are 28 male and female players, out of a total of 48, who were born outside of China, six of them have not no connection with the country.
Eileen Gu: born in America, star in China
Because in winter, China is looking for credit and a prize list: in 2018, in PyeongChang, this superpower had only won a gold medal. It was in short-track skating. So, the Chinese are recruiting talents, which they dress up with the five-star red flag. This is how last Tuesday, the skier Eileen Gu, also called Gu Ailing, born in San Francisco in 2003, won the big air gold medal for China. “Before she switched allegiances to leave Team USA and compete for China in 2019, Gu was virtually unknown in the country of 1.4 billion people. But at the Winter Olympics, she is a Chinese skiing star, expected to potentially win up to three medals for China and inspire more young Chinese to take up winter sports. “, writes Viola Zhou, on the site vice.com.
“A world selection”
We can be ironic regarding China, for which a billion men is not enough to set up an ice hockey team worthy of the name. But China is by far not the first nation to naturalize athletes: for the PyeongChang Games, South Korea had monopolized biathletes of Russian origin (Ekaterina Avvakumova, Anna Frolina, Alexander Starodubets) and Canadian hockey players ( Matt Dalton and Eric Regan). A total of six naturalized players had defended the colors of South Korea in ice hockey. In 2015, Qatar hosted the world handball championships: it reached the final – lost once morest France – thanks to a foreign legion originally made up of Croats, Cubans, Egyptians and French. The Austrian goalkeeper, Thomas Bauer, then spoke of “a world selection”. The following year, at the Rio Games, Qatar fielded 80% foreign-born handball players.
Qatar is a regular at these sporting naturalisations: in 2000, for a million dollars and a few passports, it bought an entire Bulgarian weightlifting team; in 2003, he cornered two long-winded Kenyans, Stephen Cherono and Albert Chepkurui, who will run in the Olympics under the names of Saif Saeed Shaheen and Ahmad Hassan Abdullah. Right next door, Bahrain is accustomed to these athletic purchases: for twenty years, it has been raking in Nigerians, Kenyans or Ethiopians, like the runner Zenebech Tola, well known in Switzerland, who has become Maryam Yusuf Jamal. In 2014, at the Asian Games, in athletics, 14 of the 16 races were won by athletes who had renounced their African nationality for Qatar, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates.
A third of table tennis players were Chinese
The Gulf countries do not have a monopoly on this combing. In 2012, at the London Games, the British delegation included 61 athletes who were born “overseas”, elsewhere than on the island. In 2016, at the Summer Games, Turkey had delegated 103 athletes, 25 were born abroad, including 8 in Kenya. Turkey won eight medals, two of which were won by naturalized champions.
Faced with this hunt for passports and these accelerated naturalizations, Jacques Rogge, the former president of the International Olympic Committee, had declared: “We cannot oppose it because it is a question of sovereignty, but let me tell you very frankly : I do not like it.” For this to stop, the Olympics would have to be rid of all nationalism. We should start by abandoning the daily medal count and giving up the table that accompanies it. The pride of a nation should be placed somewhere other than on a podium.
Finally, let’s give back to China a bit of its sporting greatness, which has just lost 8-0 once morest the United States amputated from the NHL: in 2021, in Tokyo, seventeen table tennis players who were born in China played for another country; in 2016, in Rio, twenty-two national ping-pong teams had at least one ethnic Chinese among them; in total, a third of the players had Chinese blood.