Teens and Tactics Blur in China’s Quest for Gold

Lilibet speaks good English. Her coach is British and amply tattooed. She competed on Tuesday in park skateboarding, an insurgent sport in which the point among the sisterhood of athletes is not just winning a medal but embodying a mantra of female empowerment.

Lilibet is just a nickname. Her full name is Zheng Haohao, and at 11 she is the youngest athlete at these Games. She is also the new face of a Chinese sports-industrial complex that for decades has harnessed tens of thousands of small children in hopes of forging a tiny fraction of them into Olympic champions.

Yet Lilibet’s debut, along with those of a few other Chinese Olympians, has come in large part because she has grown up outside the state’s full embrace.

“I don’t want to put any pressure on myself,” Lilibet wrote on Chinese social media before her competition. “I just want to show my best in Paris.”

Lilibet’s carefree attitude, an energy tonic for Chinese fans at these Games, has prompted questions of whether it’s worth pushing Chinese athletes so hard for national glory.