{"id":797,"date":"2008-02-27T18:02:18","date_gmt":"2008-02-28T02:02:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ninarota.com\/tennis\/?p=797"},"modified":"2008-02-27T18:02:18","modified_gmt":"2008-02-28T02:02:18","slug":"quick-hit-chinas-young-athletes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/ninarota.com\/tennis\/quick-hit-chinas-young-athletes\/","title":{"rendered":"Quick Hit: China\u2019s Young Athletes"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><b>Welcome to the first of a new and upcoming feature on MVN: Quick Hits<\/b><\/p>\n<p>MVN is getting ready to roll out a new sitewide design and one of the new features is Quick Hits: posts containing short, undeveloped thoughts for your interest and commentary. I&#8217;m going to jump the gun here and post Quick Hits before the redesign kicks in.<\/p>\n<p>There is an <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2008\/02\/22\/sports\/othersports\/22olympics.html?scp=2&#038;sq=a+paddle+and+a+&#038;st=nyt\">article in the New York Times<\/a> today about table tennis player <b>Wang Chen<\/b>. Chen emigrated from China and will play play table tennis for the U.S. this summer at the Olympic Games in Beijing. When she was a first grader in China, she was chosen to train at a national sports training center because she managed to land three table tennis balls in a small basket.<\/p>\n<p>For a first grader that&#8217;s pretty good but it&#8217;s hardly the sophisticated culling process I would expect. What, no fast twitch muscle tests or adult growth projections? No review of parental athletic genes? No DNA tests? I&#8217;m being a bit sarcastic but my point is that youngsters are plucked out of school and sent off to training centers by age 9 based on rather arbitrary criteria to be professional athletes. In Wang&#8217;s case, she was training eight hours a day by the time she was 11 years old.<\/p>\n<p>Keep in mind that most Chinese families are allowed one child only so these kids are removed from their one-child families to become, literally, arms for the great country of China. I assume Chinese tennis players follow a similar path.<\/p>\n<p>That feels like a pretty tough life to me. What do you think?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Welcome to the first of a new and upcoming feature on MVN: Quick Hits MVN is getting ready to roll out a new sitewide design and one of the new features is Quick Hits: posts containing short, undeveloped thoughts for your interest and commentary. I&#8217;m going to jump the gun here and post Quick Hits [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-797","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/ninarota.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/797","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/ninarota.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/ninarota.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ninarota.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ninarota.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=797"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/ninarota.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/797\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/ninarota.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=797"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ninarota.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=797"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ninarota.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=797"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}