I am not sure if anybody noticed, but China swept the gold medals in both table tennis and diving….
I should state that those two sweeps accounted for nearly one third of the gold medals by China….
Not sure if such an event of one country sweeping the gold medals in multiple sports have happened recently prior to this Olympics….
Admittedly, I am divided myself on this, but I remember that rules were changed after Beijing 2008 re table tennis, but it still hasn’t stopped Chinese dominance in table tennis….
Table tennis is kind of the communist Olympic sport of choice (USSR used to be great) and they just focused on diving because it’s an area you can get good at with repetition, rather than track and field events where you need a generation of kids doing events that eventually get narrowed down to a few hundred from the millions who participated.
Athletics aren’t really a big thing in China in general, so their government has decided to focus on certain events and sets up their own academies for them. They identify kids they think will be good and send them there.
I suppose its ‘unfair’ in a certain sense but in reality the Olympics are never going to be fair. Disparity in populations, investment by the governments, genetics of athletes, support of athletes by governments, etc…