PLAYED IN CHINA

With the country staging yet another big event, Swaroop Swaminathan finds out why they keep bidding and successfully hosting large-scale competitions

- Swaroop Swaminathan

WHEN Rick Burton was the chief marketing officer for the United States Olympic and Paralympic Committee around the time the 2008 Summer Games rolled around, the body’s sponsors were thrilled that China was hosting the biggest sporting event.

While China had already hosted some big-ticket events in a mainstream standalone sport (World Badminton Championships; Beijing, in 1987) or a continental multi-discipline event (Asian Games; Beijing, 1990), the Olympics officially marked their entry into the big-time sport.

While their athletes had firmly established their presence as serial medal-winners in the 1990s, hosting the Olympics is a different challenge. That’s why when Ning Li (six-times gymnastics medallist at the Los Angeles Games in 1984) lit the cauldron in Beijing, USOC’s principal sponsors were delighted. Officially, it didn’t just mark the beginning of the 2008 Olympics. “They (our sponsors) knew China saw the Games as a coming out party for doing business and welcomed the chance to associate with China and the Olympics,” Burton, who’s now a professor in sports management at Syracuse University, tells this daily.

If 2008 was China’s coming out party, the 2023 Hangzhou Asian Games is set to be a reminder — not that anybody needed one — of the country’s pedigree when it comes to hosting blue riband competitions.