Kunming has several large sports complexes sprinkled around the outskirts of town, which are sometimes used by China’s national teams or other teams from other countries for training (altitude plus clean air and good climate equals good place to train). I went to visit one recently, just to see what they had there. The place is called HongTa Sports Center, named for the cigarette company that sponsored its construction (tobacco industry is huge here). It’s a gleaming, sprawling campus near Dianchi Lake that includes soccer fields, tennis courts, a basketball court, badminton gym, ice hockey rink, bowling alley air hockey lounge and swimming pool.
The Ride to HongTa
My trip out to HongTa on the number 73 bus included a lot of bizarre twists. I accidentally got off at the wrong stop twice—first at the massive “Kunming Youth and Children’s Center” and then at the Minority Village theme park. I also stumbled on a strange new condominium development called Nobility Designate Doors, full of grey stone, neoclassical-ish buildings. And I found two swimming pools, and took a “shortcut” that led me along a small sorry stream off of Dianchi Lake, where someone had a little vegetable garden growing, a group of Buddhists was chanting and a couple of old guys were fishing for dinner.
Future Olympians We Are Not
But this post isn’t about any of that. It’s about attending an amateur swim meet. There happened to be one going on while I was at HongTa, so I stayed to watch a bit. Now, I haven’t been to a swim meet in a very long time, but about all this had in common with any swim meet I’ve seen in my life was the fact that it took place in a pool.
The swimmers (all women) line up; some start from the water, some from the blocks. At the sound of the starting gun, the eight swimmers take off. Every race is 100 meters, and the stroke is swimmer’s choice. A couple swimmers do freestyle, a few breaststroke. One is doing some version of the doggy paddle, arms and legs fully submerged. She takes three minutes to finish; the winner comes in at a respectable 1:43.
One swimmer comes off the block doing something you could call breaststroke, but at the 25-meter mark she switches into some sort of survival stroke for people who don’t know how to swim. She stops for several seconds, hangs on the lane line. At the 50-meter mark, at the wall, an official offers her one hand; his other hand is clutching a cigarette. She stops to catch her breath. Everyone else is finished. On her return to the start, at the 65-meter mark, the officials throw her an inner tube. She doesn’t take it, and keeps splashing toward the other side. She turns onto her back and swings both of her arms back simultaneously, sort of an upside down butterfly without the hip motion or the kicking. As she gets closer to the finish, it seems impossible that she’ll make it. The officials offer a tube and this time she takes it. The crowd of 150 people, who have showed up on a Thursday afternoon to watch a race featuring people who can barely swim, starts cheering for her, encouraging her not to give up. Amazingly, she doesn’t and, 9:25 seconds after the starting gun, she touches the wall. The crowd erupts in applause.
I stay to watch three heats, and each time the same thing happens. One or two people who can barely swim manages to complete 100 yards, and the spectators love every painstaking, near-drowning minute of it. These women couldn’t be further from Olympians, but somehow the whole thing reminds me of that thing they call the “Olympic spirit.”
I have video evidence, but it is painful to watch.
actice has all but disappeared. It amuses me that they decided to do this, since most days I see no other foreigners at the pool. The pool manager said something to me about Chinese people having passed a health inspection that foreigners haven't, which, given the rather scary and uncomfortable health check I had to get to obtain my student visa, strikes me as inaccurate.
