If Sweden is a prosperous sports giant in Europe, Singapore is a competitive sports minnow in Asia. However, public sports facilities are extensively provided in Singapore. I understand that for every few thousand residents there is a lighted sports center available and they are charged at a low cost. It's completely different in Shanghai, where I have to pay an annual fee of several thousand yuan for the use of the gymnasium and swimming pool near my home.

In fact, the Swedish and Singaporean governments spend no less funds on sports than our own. The difference is that most of our funds go to competitive sports teams, while they spend theirs on public sports facilities that will not in themselves deliver gold medals.

Of course, we should attach importance to gold medals. An athlete who makes a career of competitive sport should consider a gold medal as the greatest target in his/her life. It would be ridiculous to require a competitive athlete to ignore competition scores and limit his or her focus to the spirit of sportsmanship. It would be equally foolish to expect spectators not to be excited by the prospect of a medal, but to be simply motivated by the "spirit" of an event.

There is a dialectical relationship between the Olympic spirit of "faster, higher and stronger" and the aim of "building health through the promotion of sporting activity". Hosting an Olympics serves to promote the development of sports around the world, which accordingly aims to improve people's health throughout the world. Consequently, if a country has a strong base in public involvement in sports, it will do well at the Olympics. I speak highly of medals won by Australia, Britain and Holland, since they were won in the right way. These medals are indeed the prize for their efforts to develop grass-roots sport.

The relationship between sports and medals is similar to that of education and examinations, and economic activity and GDP. Examination results and GDP statistics are a standardized way to represent levels of educational and economic development. But standards are always liable to distortion through their relationship with honors and benefits. Thus the tendency towards "marks are all that count" and "GDP is the only valid economic index" has caused the deviant phenomena of exam-oriented education and destructive development.

With GDP still so low in China, it is very difficult for us to conform to the long-term people-oriented goals of the "Scientific Outlook on Development". But now that China has topped the gold medal table at the Beijing Olympics, will this present an opportunity to shift our focus from competitive sports to the development of grass-roots popular sporting activity?

(China.org.cn translated by Wang Wei, August 26, 2008)