‘Gold or nothing’: China’s skeleton coach says foreign coaches expected to deliver Olympic glory at Beijing 2022
Disappointing medal showing in Pyeongchang will not be tolerated at home Games but Jeff Pain says experts ‘haven’t been allowed to do much of anything’
At least Jeff Pain knows what is expected of him.
Hired by China for his coaching expertise in the winter sport of skeleton, the Olympic silver medallist for Canada in 2006 has four more years to shape his rookie team of Chinese athletes into ice-sliding champions at the 2022 Winter Games in Beijing.
Here’s the rub: Wanting to win in dangerous, technically complex sports on snow and ice and actually being equipped to beat established winter-sports powers are very different things.
“It’s not just about putting on a pair of shoes and being fast,” Pain says of skeleton. “You have to be able to bend over, grab a sled, run as fast as you can, dive on it and then get to the bottom without dying.”
The blueprint of throwing money and foreign know-how at hand-picked Chinese athletes is familiar. But results in 2022 are on course to be less spectacular than when Beijing hosted the Summer Games in 2008. Then, a costly, years-long national medal-mining drive paid off handsomely, with China surging to the top of the gold-medal bragging table.