China: Yuppie Flight; China wants medals. But rising prosperity is creating a crisis for its sports programs.(Cover Story)

Byline: Craig Simons

Wang Junxia's decision to quit distance running was an early sign of the revolt now reshaping China's Olympics program. A skinny prodigy, she rose through state sports schools to the national team under Ma Junren, a former prison guard who coached like a drill sergeant. He demanded daily marathons on the Tibetan plateau, banned dating, inflicted corporal punishment on laggards. As the anchor of "Ma's Army," Wang set numerous world records and went on to win gold and silver medals at the Atlanta

--Games. But in 1997 she retired, at the age of 25, after developing a nervous disorder that she attributed to Ma's "brutal" training. She figures she could still win Olympic gold but says she is much happier in her new, "less stressful" life. Two years ago she founded a Shenyang running club that has 20,000 members, and no Olympians. It's for fun.

Wang's rags-to-burnout story was once typical of the Chinese system. Children as young as 6 are offered spots in one of more than 3,000 specialized athletics boarding schools and reared in the state-controlled system. National-team members get monthly stipends, free room and board and perks like university scholarships. In the 1970s and '80s, poor parents would literally beg coaches to take kids. But now rising prosperity is turning sport into a Yuppie diversion, creating a crisis for Chinese athletics, says Ren Hai, director of the state-run Olympic Studies Center in Beijing. "Now," he says, "a lot of kids have money to do other things, like go to university or study art," and their parents want them to focus on books, not sports.

There are more reliable ways to attain middle-class comfort in China now. Less than 20 percent of China's sports-school graduates make the core of 17,000 full-time athletes supported by provincial and city governments. Only 3,200 make the national team, which pays stipends of $120 to $500 a month, up from the $20 Wang received monthly in 1993 but far less than typical white-collar salaries. The government still helps retired athletes find jobs, but mostly as poorly paid teachers and coaches, and most look instead for private-sector work.

That's not to say that China's sports program isn't still a model of central planning. Since 2001, when Beijing won the right to host the 2008 Olympics, the number ...