If Liu and the other Chinese weightlifters are stripped of their Beijing gold medals, the question remains: Did they have any choice in any doping? Liu, who was originally selected as a judo athlete, has toiled in the state sports system since she was a little girl. (Four years ago, she was receiving less than $10,000 in annual salary for her record-breaking contributions to the state.) Eight years ago, I visited a shabby sports school in eastern Shandong province where young weightlifters spent the days in a clanging gym in lieu of primary school. After training, the kids, with their callused and chalk-stained hands, walked up to a table lined with paper cups. Each cup held a few pills, which they swallowed, one after the other, with gulps of warm water.
What were the pills for? I asked one girl. “It’s medicine to make me strong,” she told me. An alarmed coach intervened, described the pills as “natural herbs” and tried to hustle me from the room. When I asked if I could take one of the pills home with me — I wanted to see whether it really was just herbs — he refused. His excuse? They were too expensive to waste on someone not in the Chinese sports system.