City Games more than warm-up for London Olympics
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Xinhua, October 17, 2011
With just 10 months away from the London Olympics, the Seventh Chinese City Games, which kicked off in Nanchang Sunday evening, will serve as the best arena for the Chinese athletes to finetune their shape.
The last multi-sport gala being held in China ahead of the London Olympics, the City Games has been attracting athletes from national teams of table tennis, swimming, diving and gymnastics who hope to hit their stride as soon as possible in the run-up to London.
In shape of a national juniors' tournament in its first two editions, the City Games is designed to groom future Olympic champions. Sports officials will take the chances to seek teenage talents as backing forces for China.
However, three years after China reaped superb success by grabbing 51 golds and totalling 100 medals in the Beijing Olympics, the most populous country has shifted its focus from just making Olympic champions or winning medals to harvesting multiple effects in comprehensive fields.
Getting more of China's 1.3 billion people involved in sports was one of the legacy aims of the Beijing Olympics, and the City Games can be another force encouraging more Chinese than ever before to commit themselves to sports and make the national drive of "Sports for All" even more aware across the country.
The Nanchang Games showed that the Chinese people are paying more attention to the popularity of sports and fun of sports instead of the competition results, with all kinds of medal standings dropped off the Games.
The governments of hosting Jiangxi Province and Nanchang city have put huge investment into public fitness facilities in the parks and communities in the city.
According to Jiang Bo, director of the Nanchang Sports Bureau, 10 new venues including the 60,000-seat Nanchang International Sports Centre have been completed and 22 more have been reconstructed. All the facilities will serve the locals as fitness and entertainment centers afterwards.
Besides its competition nature, the City Games will also serve as classrooms for the junior athletes as well as visitors as Jiangxi Province boasts of many historic sites from which the teenagers will have a glimpse into the revolutionary history of the country.
Nanchang, where 60 percent of the Games' events are held, is itself a historical site. On August 1, 1927, Communist-led armed forces held an uprising in Nanchang, which marks the birth of the armed forces of the Communist Party of China (CPC).
Ruijin, which will play host to the boxing tournament of the Games, is known as the cradle of the People's Republic of China and the starting point of the famous Long March of the Red Army.
Jinggangshan, located in the middle of the Luoxiao Mountains in the southwest part of Jiangxi Province, is the first base established in the countryside by the first generation of CPC leaders like Mao Zedong and Zhu De.
And the teenage athletes can even have a better understanding of the Chinese revolution in the 1930s through the exhibitions to be held in the athletes' village.
Thus, the Nanchang Games will be remembered not only as a sports gathering, but also a festival of the ordinary people and a classroom for China's revolutionary traditions and patriotism education.
