Editor’s Note: Meet Junling Cui, our exclusive wOw Woman on the scene in Beijing. For the Olympics, wowOwow goes right to the source for an insider’s perspective on the news coming out of Beijing. Junling will be reporting from both the women’s perspective and from the point of view of a Chinese national, on all things Olympics — from the athletes’ stories to the social impact of the games.

Day Five

In China, middle-class families don’t want their kids to do sports. The reason is very simple. Sports in China are still not very commercialized, and professional sports training is brutal. Very often, kids are handpicked at a very young age, and sent to sports schools to get training and education (with the emphasis very much on training). But the hard fact here is, if they don’t make the top level in whatever sport they’re chosen for at a very young age, they’ve got trouble. They will have a hard time making a living.

One of the under-covered aspects of China’s success in this year’s Olympics is this: Most of China’s gold medal winners come from poor, peasant regions of the country. When little kids are placed into sports-training programs by their parents, they are there for one major reason: the hope that their kids will eventually win a medal — and bring the family some financial relief.

Yes, I know, this sounds vaguely familiar. Sports have traditionally been a way out of poverty for American kids and their families too. But it’s different here. Today, China won a few more gold medals. Yang Wei won the men’s all-around gymnastics. He is from Xiantao, Hubei province, a small town in a rural, deeply poor province. Poverty in China in the countryside means earning about $100 to $150 per month. Most professional athletes in China are from the countryside, such as Zhang Juanjuan, who won the gold today in women’s archery. Or Chen Yanqing, who won the 58 kilogram women’s weight lifting. Even the parents of Yi Jianlian — now a millionaire forward for the New Jersey Nets, playing for the China national basketball team — hesitated to allow their son to become a professional basketball player. They themselves were professional athletes, and they worried that if Yi didn’t make it to the top, it would be very hard for him to make a decent living in China.

But for many poor families, the parents think it’s a chance to change a kid’s life. Chen Yanqing’s dream came true when she won the weight-lifting gold in the 58k weight. Her father said, in advance of the Games, “All generations of my family are peasants. I thought weight lifting might be a way to change her fate." Her fate has now been changed, by average Chinese standards. In 2004, athletes who won gold got 200,000 yuan from the state as a reward (about $30,000). The reward this year is said to be higher — but how much is not yet clear. And Chen, after she retires, will become an official in Jiangsu province’s Sports Bureau — a sinecure for life.

So when you watch most of these Chinese kids win medals, understand where they came from. And also think about those who didn’t make it to the top.