The Most Popular American Team in China??

One of my favorite things about the Olympics is cheering for my country in sports I normally pay little or no attention to. In fact, it seems that once every four years is a perfect amount for me when it comes to the majority of Olympic sports. During my quadrennial obscure sports binge, I'll often just turn the TV on to whatever sport is live and see if it piques my interest: judo, a little; swimming prelims, ehhhh; air pistol, no thank you.

Anyway, tonight I found myself watching the tail end of an early round women's volleyball game between Team USA and Team Japan. I had heard from a few friends that women's volleyball is a pretty popular event over here, but I was still a bit surprised by the sheer volume of the chants of "USA! USA!". I didn't expect there to be that large an American contingent present at such an early match, and the camera shots of the crowd didn't seem to show a whole bunch of Americans (usually quite easy to spot, even in massive crowds). And I definitely didn't think the crowd was anti-Japan enough to be that pro-US. So why the positively Mark Rowswell -ian cheers? (The man know in China as 大山，or Da Shan, is a subject for an entirely different post).

My unasked question was answered soon enough, during the end-of-day wrap-up on CCTV-2. The anchor said that they were going to a brief interview with the US coach, and to my surprise she was a native Chinese speaker (please remember that news regarding this sport does not make it into my normal reading material). In fact, the US coach is none other than "Jenny" "The Iron Hammer" Lang Ping (郎平). Lang Ping, I soon found out, is an iconic athlete in China, nearly as famous as Liu Xiang or Li Ning (the athlete/ entrepreneur who lit the torch). She led the Chinese volleyball squad to a gold medal at the Los Angeles Olympics in 1984.

I cannot express how great I think it is that the US team has this person coaching for them. For one, the team members' Olympic trip to China is assuredly a different experience entirely from the run-of-the-mill (from my standpoint) trips that most teams will be having. Also, I think anything that gets the home crowd waving the red, white, and blue is very cool.

Still, it may be a stretch to say that they are more popular with the locals than the USA basketball squad.

Update: I was just perusing my usual China related media, and saw that the Wall Street Journal's China Journal just published a similar post entitled "Return of the 'Iron Hammer'". Apparently somebody over there was watching tonight's match as well. While I assume that none of the readers of the aforementioned blog would deign to read this one, for pride's sake I must mention that according to Google Reader, mine was published 2 minutes earlier. If you have time, compare the two entries, and let me know what you think (and remember that they are paid to blog).