Paralympics: Guessing about China as the best nation

The international competition is amazed at the Chinese recipe for success and questions the class classification of the athletes from the controversial host country. The German association head Friedhelm Julius Beucher is already reminded of “Chinese surprise bags from my childhood”. At the Games in Beijing there is an unprecedented explosion in performance that is puzzling. Also in the Austrian camp, for example with Markus Salcher. The alpine skier took silver in the Super-G behind the Chinese Jingyi Liang, whose classification had sparked debate. “On paper we have the same disability. But he was reclassified four times in a very short period of time. We protested against this before the season because that shouldn't actually happen. Of course it’s annoying for me,” said Salcher. This increase is surprising After moving up from 16th to third place in the national rankings at the Olympics compared to the previous Winter Games, the Chinese dominate the games for disabled athletes almost at will. After the first days of competition and a series of gold medals, the hosts already had a huge lead in the medal table. Before the Games began, China had won a single medal in twelve Para Winter Games: in curling in 2018. There are many approaches to explanations. Since hosting the 2015 Games, China has hired good coaches. The country also has around 85 million disabled people, slightly more than the population of Germany, for example. In addition, the training should be extremely tough. But the work factor alone does not explain this enormous leap in performance in professionalized para sports. China's athletes had hardly been seen at any international competitions because of the Corona exit ban that has been in effect since 2020. Now they are three to four seconds ahead of the competition on the slopes and cross-country ski trails. Not classified correctly? One approach could be that they could not be classified correctly because of their frequent lack of appearances. In winter sports, starters receive a time factor based on their level of disability. And this is based on experience and previous achievements.

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Paralympics: Guessing about China as the best nation

The fact that host China dominates everything at the Winter Paralympics out of nowhere arouses both admiration and doubt.

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