Sporting Superpower

With Beijing becoming the first city in history to host both a Summer and a Winter Olympics, the Chinese capital has truly arrived as an international sporting destination. But the glamor of those two Games in 2008 and 2022 hid a strategic powerplay by China to leverage the Olympics as a way to further its global ambitions.

Despite international calls for a boycott of the 2022 Olympics due to human rights violations, Beijing was determined to show that it could conquer COVID-19 and host another spectacular Olympics. But behind all the politics and the soft power, China's sports industry has changed dramatically since those first Games in 2008:

• A drive to promote football with the ultimate goal of winning the World Cup has already gone through both boom and bust.
• International leagues such as the NBA, the WTA and the English Premier League now have to tread through a minefield of nationalistic fervor to engage in China.
• Sportswear companies like Li-Ning and Anta have ridden a wave of domestic support in an ongoing bid to topple Nike and Adidas in the world's largest consumer market.
• Ski resorts and ice rinks have sprung up across the country as a surging winter sports market takes shape.
• The naturalization of athletes, such as Eileen Gu, unearths difficult questions about what it truly means to be Chinese.