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Anonymous
>>246564
No thanks, think I'll live in reality.
-Life in the sports factories, however, wasn't so different from life on the assembly lines. Both occupations provided workers with (or condemned them to) lifetime employment within the same danwei, or work unit. The best athletes usually lived five or six to a room, but they received a steadier diet of milk and meat than the rest of the population, a significant perk in a land where food was severely rationed. But athletic training was physically punishing and subject to the danwei's dictatorial rule. The danwei's minipotentates made, or at least enforced, nearly all of the key decisions in people's lives: where to live, where to work, what to eat, whom to marry and?most insidiously?what to think.
The athletes trained eight to 10 hours a day, year-round, on outdoor courts that were bitterly cold in winter and blisteringly hot in summer. Coaches routinely beat players and forced them to play while sick or injured, pressing them to display revolutionary spirit. Some cried tears of pain throughout practice. Others vomited at the sight of a basketball court. But they kept going. Lin Meizheng, a forward on the Shanghai women's team, suffered from a painful kidney infection but never missed a practice. "We always felt that showing spirit was the top priority," she says. "You may not be able to improve your technique, but you can always improve your spirit."
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