Compiled by PHILIP REID

Li Na to the forefront of sporting revolution in China

THE SURPRISE of many at Li Na becoming the first Chinese player to reach a tennis Grand Slam final at the Australian Open is hard to understand. Why should there be any surprise? After all, give or take a few, there are 1.4 billion people in China and, with a huge investment in all sport, it shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone that the Chinese are starting to dominate outside of their traditional sports of gymnastics and table tennis.

In a relatively short space of time, China has evolved into a sporting superpower. And, while Chinese sport may still be basking in the success of the 2008 Olympics and now impacting on other major international fronts, it hasn’t always had an easy ride. Far from it, in fact.

It was back in 1959 that Rong Guotuan became China’s first world champion in any sport. Not surprisingly, that sport was table tennis. But his win was the exception at the time. In 1958, China had quit a number of international sporting organisations – including the International Olympic Committee, due to it’s perceived anti-China position at the time – while the Cultural Revolution prevented the development of sports in the country.

China didn’t rejoin the IOC until 1979 and it was at the 1984 Olympic Games in Los Angeles that a new era dawned: a marksman by the name of Xu Haifeng captured China’s first Olympic gold medal, in the free pistol 60 shots event, and they went on to pocket 15 gold medals.

By the time they played host in 2008, China had become a sporting superpower within the Olympic movement and captured 51 gold medals, the most won by any country at the Games.

Since coming in from the cold, China has developed a sporting culture and fed on successes achieved by gymnast Li Ning, table tennis player Deng Yaping and the women’s volleyball team which won the world championship title five times in a row during the 1980s.

Sporting development increased dramatically after Beijing was awarded the Olympics, even if there were critics who targeted China’s gold-medal producing “state sport system”. These critics accused China of sponsoring state-run schools and having a centralised sports administration without worrying about the financial costs involved. If this system was originally borrowed from the former East Germany, it seems ironic that countries such as Australia and Japan have also now adopted similar structures.

This perception that China only funds elite sportsmen has actually changed in recent years, since Beijing, as there has been considerable investment to ensure participation in sport by “ordinary” people and not just elite athletes. The success of the Olympics there has actually had a beneficial outcome in broadening the appeal of sport. In the 2010 winter Olympics in Canada, we saw how China had even taken to the sport of curling.

And, as we’ve seen with Li Na’s rise in women’s tennis to the point of reaching the Australian Open final, Chinese athletes are moving out of the comfort zones of gymnastics, diving and table tennis to create waves in other codes to perhaps hint at what lies ahead. This was also evident in last year’s swimming world championships, where Zhang Lin became the first Chinese male swimmer to win a world gold medal.

China has even discovered golf. Eyebrows were raised when Augusta National issued an invite to Shang Lian-wei to play in the 2004 Masters tournament but, since then, there has been an increase in the number of courses in the country (from 200 to over 450) and it is estimated there are now one million golfers (and climbing) in China.

With the resources being put into developing sport in the country, the likelihood is that China will become more and more a factor in sports in the years ahead, particularly in individual sports like tennis, swimming and golf. Li Na’s success in becoming the first Chinese tennis player to reach a Grand Slam final is likely to be only the start of things.

Just wait until they discover Gaelic football!

Taxi drivers know a good Carr   

YOU KNOW the way taxi drivers seem to know everything and everyone? Now I know they’re right. Any of them who do their best to eke a living operating off the rank outside Donaghmede Shopping Centre seem to know all there is to know about Stephen Carr. And, in all these discussions, the player’s inherent decency and his passion for football are constantly to the fore.

In these days when it is often difficult to showcase any soccer player as a role model, Carr’s dedication to his sport and refusal to succumb to a run of career-threatening injuries stands out as a beacon of hope.

On Wednesday evening, at the ripe old age of 34, Carr – wearing the captain’s armband – was inspirational as Birmingham City overcame West Ham United in the English League Cup semi-final where his crunching, ball-winning tackle on Kieron Dyer set up the extra-time goal that earned his team a trip to Wembley and a date with Arsenal.

It is to Carr’s credit that he is still flourishing in the top flight of the English Premiership, even if his career – which started when he was signed to Spurs as a teenager by Ossie Ardiles – is now nearing a close. And wouldn’t it be entirely fitting if, some 12 years after winning a League Cup medal with Spurs, Carr were to earn another piece of silverware?

What makes Carr’s career all the more notable is that, after being effectively consigned to the scrapheap by then Newcastle United manager Kevin Keegan in 2008 because of a succession of knee and foot injuries, and unable to win a contract from any team in any division, the Dubliner retired from the game but continued to train on his own, regained his fitness and was eventually rewarded with a trial in 2009 by Birmingham.

That month-long trial turned out to be one of the best moves the club ever made – and, now, Carr, their captain, has brought them to Wembley. In so doing, he has demonstrated all of those qualities which taxi man after taxi man on that Donaghmede rank have been preaching for years of their favourite sporting son done good.

Chavez not the enemy of golf . . . just courses

THE IMPRESSION has been given that Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez would love nothing better than to run an earth digger through every golf course in the South American country and transform the land into social housing.

In fact, the leftist leader has called golf a pastime of the rich and shown a capacity to act rather than just talk: his socialist government has closed six courses in Caracas in recent years, all but one of them on land owned by the state oil company.

Still, with about the same swiftness as Charlie Haughey showed in getting to Paris to acclaim Stephen Roche’s win in the Tour de France in 1987, Chavez didn’t waste any time in offering his congratulations to the wonderfully-named Jhonattan Vegas after the golfer’s win in the Bob Hope Classic on the US Tour. “I’m not an enemy of golf. I’m not an enemy of any sport,” said Chavez in a televised speech, adding: “What I’ve done is to criticise there are some rich guys in Caracas who have . . . . golf courses and next to them the ‘ranchos’ are falling down.”

Chavez has suggested the land on the golf courses could be better used as his government seeks to speed the construction of public housing.

While Vegas’s win – which also earned him an invite to the US Masters in April – was celebrated in his homeland, there remained the irony that the very course where the golfer learned the game and his father worked as a groundsman is no longer in existence. It has been closed and redeveloped for housing by the government.

Authorities hear Contador's warning?

YOU’VE got to hand it to the zero tolerance (well, almost zero tolerance) approach being adopted by the various sporting bodies in Spain to the ubiquitous issue of drug use in sport.

While no fewer than 14 people, including a vice-president of the Spanish athletics body, were detained as part of a probe into a doping scandal last month, the attention switched to cycling in midweek when a one-year ban was handed down to Tour de France champion Alberto Contador.

Contador tested positive for having traces of clenbuterol (a banned weight loss/muscle-building drug also used to fatten cattle) in a test during last year’s Tour de de France. The initial one-year ban was issued by the sports international body in August and endorsed midweek by the Spanish authorities, although Contador plans to appeal. Interestingly, they stopped short of handing out a two-year ban. Also interestingly, Contador had said he’d quit the sport for good if he was handed a two-year ban.

Bookies know value of home advantage

THE bookies are never usually too far off the mark in assessing odds, all of which makes their reaction to home advantage in the Heineken Cup all the more revealing.

Historically, teams with home advantage tend to have the edge on visiting teams in the competition which explains why long-time Cup favourites Toulouse drifted in the market – going from 11 to 4 before the draw to 7 to 1 after being given an away quarter-final and, if they win that, another away game in the semi-finals.

In contrast, Leinster – generally available at 4 to 1 before earning a home quarter-final – were quickly installed as 9 to 4 favourites to regain the trophy.