Racism, Sexism and Swimming at the London Olympics

I’ve been a little taken aback this week at the level of racism against China in the Brit­ish and US media, and on longer-​than-​usual com­ment threads on vari­ous friends’ face­book walls. I mean, I know that racism in sport and in the media is noth­ing new, and I know that being mixed race white-​Chinese, I’m tak­ing the vari­ous swipes being thrown at Chinese ath­letes par­tic­u­larly per­son­ally. But still, the obsess­ive furore that has sur­roun­ded the 16 year-​old swim­mer Ye Shi­wen has brought out so many hack­neyed ori­ent­al­ist ste­reo­types, it would be bor­ing if it wasn’t so hurt­ful and infuriating.

For any­one who’s been asleep this past week, Ye Shi­wen broke the 400 metre indi­vidual med­ley world record, break­ing her own per­sonal best time by 5 seconds and power­ing home in the last 100 meters to take gold in the event. In fact she swam so fast to the fin­ish line that, as has been cited by count­less com­ment­at­ors, her split time for her final 50 meter lap was 0.17 of a second faster than that of Ryan Lochte, the US swim­mer who won the equi­val­ent men’s event the night before. But rather than con­grat­u­lat­ing this young woman on an amaz­ing swim and cel­eb­rat­ing the small shifts hap­pen­ing to move swim­ming ever-​so slightly away from being the white-​dominated sport that it is (I think only row­ing has a less diverse group of com­pet­it­ors), Ye imme­di­ately became the sub­ject of doubt and spec­u­la­tion. Top US coach John Leonard described Ye’s win as ‘unbe­liev­able’, ‘dis­turb­ing’ and ‘sus­pi­cious’, BBC com­ment­ator Clare Bald­ing turned to her co-​commentator and asked ‘How many ques­tions will there be, Mark, about some­body who can sud­denly swim so much faster than she ever has before’, and so began a week of intens­ive media spec­u­la­tion over whether Ye was doping.

Now like all Olympic medal­lists, Ye has been tested for banned sub­stances, and has come up clean. But that’s not enough for thou­sands of arm­chair com­ment­at­ors who have sud­denly become self-​appointed experts on what could pos­sibly be the ‘nat­ural’ physique and cap­ab­il­it­ies of a Chinese girl. The fact that Ye, a young woman, had one lap faster than male Lochte has been ban­died around as evid­ence that she was dop­ing, ignor­ing the fact that over­all Ye’s time for the 400 meters was still over 20 seconds slower than Lochte’s, and that it’s not humanly impossible for women to swim faster than men some­times. The Daily Mail jumped on board to assert that Ye has an ‘unusu­ally mas­cu­line physique’ in an art­icle in which the journ­al­ist seems to refer to China and East Ger­many almost inter­change­ably. There is of course no deny­ing that Chinese swim­mers were involved in drug scan­dals in the 90s, but to assume Ye is dop­ing because (a) she swum fast and (b) she is Chinese, is racism at its most plainly obvious.

Deny­ing alleg­a­tions of racism, John Leonard and oth­ers have argued that their sus­pi­cions are not due to Ye’s race or nation­al­ity but simply the cold hard facts of ‘the way she won the race’. Ye’s swim was ‘an anom­aly’ that needs to be poin­ted out and ques­tioned, they assert, ignor­ing the fact that every world record break­ing swim is, by defin­i­tion, an anom­aly. No woman in his­tory has ever swum that race that fast before, it was ‘an out­rageous per­form­ance’, Leonard asserts, ‘unpre­ced­en­ted in any way, shape or form in the his­tory of our sport’. Well, yes sweet pea, on the one hand, that’s what a new world record is, and then on the other, it is not really that unpre­ced­en­ted. Ye only broke the world record by 1 second, and even at the age of 16 she has been swim­ming inter­na­tion­ally for some time already. Leonard claims that Ye’s improve­ment of 5 seconds over 400 meters makes her swim sus­pi­cious, yet young swim­mers often take chunks of time off their per­sonal bests — as a teen­ager Aus­tralian swim­mer Ian Thorpe also took 5 seconds off his per­sonal best over 400 meters at the 1999 Pan Pacific cham­pi­on­ships, and just last night 15 year-​old US swim­mer Katie Ledecky took almost 10 seconds off her per­sonal best to win the 800 meters free­style. Yet Leonard is not rais­ing any sus­pi­cions there.

But were any of Ledecky’s laps faster than a man’s? Well it is more dif­fi­cult to work out because the dis­tance pool swim for the men is 1500 meters rather than 800 meters, so there’s no dir­ect com­par­ison to draw from. It would be well within the math­em­at­ical cap­ab­il­it­ies of the ‘sports sci­ent­ists’, coaches, journ­al­ists and other com­ment­at­ors to work out her com­par­at­ive lap speeds, but we won’t know because they won’t bother because Ledecky is not Chinese. She’s white Amer­ican, and they are sup­posed to take chunks off their per­sonal bests, break records and win gold medals. For them, it’s just natural.

And while such sex­ism and racism is rel­at­ively pre­dict­able from the tabloid press and bit­ter US coaches, the more lib­eral media and all kinds of ‘sports sci­ent­ists’ came out pub­licly rais­ing their well-​educated eye­brows over Ye’s per­form­ance and ana­lys­ing her race down to her last stroke. I can guar­an­tee you that Ledecky’s swim will not come under any­where near the level of scru­tiny as Ye’s. Of course, I have no idea whether either of them are on drugs. Both their tests have come up neg­at­ive but it’s pos­sible that they might still be found pos­it­ive in years to come as tech­no­lo­gies catch up with each other. But I’m no more sus­pi­cious of Ye than I am of Ledecky, or of any Olympic ath­lete for that mat­ter. And whatever hap­pens from here, the level of quasi-​scientific objec­ti­fic­a­tion of Ye’s body and per­form­ance that has already taken place (over­whelm­ingly by white men), is overtly remin­is­cent of an ori­ent­al­ism that has formed the basis forshame­ful his­tor­ies of sexual viol­ence and racism.

Unable to offer any actual evid­ence that Ye was dop­ing, media atten­tion turned to her train­ing régime. Whereas sports enthu­si­asts gen­er­ally pride them­selves on how hard ‘their’ ath­letes train and how much they want to win it ‘for team GB/​Australia/​team USA/​insert coun­try here’, the inter­net was sud­denly full of scath­ing attacks on what, hav­ing never been to China and hav­ing no under­stand­ing of Chinese cul­ture, they assumed Ye’s tor­tu­ous train­ing régime and nation­al­ist indoc­trin­a­tion to be. Images from a Chinese art­icle about unhappy chil­dren at gym­nastic train­ing camps were taken out of con­text by west­ern journ­al­ists to prove how hein­ous and inhu­mane the ‘bru­tal train­ing camps’ of China really are. Whereas identi­fy­ing sport­ing poten­tial at an early age and receiv­ing a sport schol­ar­ship to live and train at a spe­cial­ist insti­tute is held in the highest prestige in Aus­tralia, the US and other west­ern coun­tries, the same prac­tices in China were deemed bar­baric, heart­less and reflect­ive of China’s vicious one-​party ‘total­it­arian’ régime.

Now, I don’t have room here to go into the details of the Chinese polit­ical sys­tem and the life chances or ‘hap­pi­ness levels’ of an aver­age Chinese cit­izen com­pared to cit­izens of multi-​party west­ern states. But no one reacted to Michael Phelps’ highly anom­al­ous 17 Olympic gold medals by open­ing up a debate about the vari­ous prob­lems of the US polit­ical sys­temand the des­per­ate meas­ures that US ath­letes go to in the hope of Olympic glory. And at any rate, anyone who thinks human rights viol­a­tions and stand­ards of liv­ing are sig­ni­fic­antly worse in China than they are in, for example, the US,needs to have a crit­ical think about the cri­teria they are using to make those judge­ments. None of this is to say that they aren’t massive prob­lems with the Chinese state, but ulti­mately, it has to be asked why it is that when a young Chinese woman wins an event in a white-​dominated sport, white men the world over feel both the need and enti­tle­ment to prove that she must have either been cheat­ing, or that she’s sub­ject to a tor­tu­ous train­ing régime unthink­able in the lib­er­ated west. So, true to every bad Hol­ly­wood movie you have ever watched fea­tur­ing an Asian woman, she must either be a vil­lain or a vic­tim. In actual fact, Ye Shi­wen is the hero in this story, and it’s about time we let her have the credit she deserves for play­ing that role in these Olympics.

First pub­lished on Half in Place

This entry was posted on 6 August 2012 at 7:01 am and is filed under Gender, Political Philosophy, Postcolonialism, Race. Published under Creative Commons (CC) Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License: You are welcome to share and remix this content for non-commercial purposes. Kindly acknowledge and hyperlink the source.