In an unusual move to secure a gymnastics golden harvest at next year's Olympic Games, Chinese gymnasts and their coaches will sign contracts with the sport's state governing center to ensure everyone in the 2008 lineup will be injury free and drug free, a top team official said.
Li Xiaopeng, China's top male gymnast who has won 14 Olympic and world titles, conducts power training at China's national team's training base in Beijing. Li is struggling to recover from a foot injury that forced him to miss the entire 2007 season. [China Daily] |
"In the coming days, all the Chinese national coaches will sign contracts with the gymnastics administrative center to prevent serious injuries from happening before the Beijing Games.
Also all the gymnasts will sign with the center to prevent any doping offenses," China's gymnastics team leader Zhang Peiwen said on the sidelines of the 2007 Good Luck Beijing Gymnastics International Invitational Tournament, which ended on Monday in the newly built National Indoor Stadium.
"I don't know exactly when they will sign because we are still working on the details of the contracts. But I think it will be pretty soon."
In a high-risk sport where every athlete is trying to jump higher and rotate faster in fractions of seconds, injuries are almost inevitable.
This is especially true since the FIG (International Gymnastics Federation) enacted a new scoring system, which encourages gymnasts to go for more difficult routines.
But for the Chinese gymnasts who have prevailed on the world stage in recent years, it's no longer a matter of how difficult their routines are - it's also a matter of how healthy they are come next August.
"We don't want the injuries to pull our legs and destroy our prospects for the Beijing Games," Zhang said. "I hope we can reduce injuries to a minimum by signing these contracts."
Chinese officials fear any injury - particularly one to their elite athletes - will put their efforts to waste, as they are taking arguably the best Chinese team in history into the Beijing Games. The Chinese already pocketed 13 gold medals in the last two World Championships, including an eight-gold haul at the Aarhus Worlds.
Fears of injury have grown considerably since China's top male gymnast, Li Xiaopeng, a 14-time world and Olympic champion, has struggled to recover from a bone fracture in his foot suffered during training in March.
The 26-year-old's slow recovery has caused him to miss all of the 2007 season, including the Good Luck invitational in which he planned to compete. His long-term absence has raised concerns about whether he will be ready to join the Chinese team in Beijing next year.
"His recovery has been slow," confessed Zhang. "We took a conservative healing approach to his injury, but his situation is not stable."
