WITNESS: Shooting hoops, in the name of the state

Michael Fiala is a senior photo editor based in Singapore who joined Reuters three years ago. He first traveled to mainland China in 1990 on the way to North Korea, and was transferred to Beijing the following year. Fiala has since kept close ties to China and in the following story he tells the story of a family of top Chinese basketball players who will be attending the Beijing Olympics in August as spectators after years working "for the glory of the country".

By Michael Fiala

SINGAPORE (Reuters) - Ju Dan was 2-1/2 years old when she was sent to the Chinese sporting elite's boarding kindergarten while her father coached basketball in China and Africa. She was a child prodigy.

The little girl whose father had represented China at basketball was picked in 1974 as an athlete capable of competing for the "glory of the country", a slogan she would see and hear often over the next two decades.

She lived at the kindergarten for the next three years, and was to enter China's sports mill full-time at age 11.

In the words of the man who came to collect her birth certificate so the sports school could take her over, she was "born to play basketball". She was tall for her age -- she would grow to 6ft -- and strong.

I met her in 1992 and learned her story, which is hardly unique to China.

The Communist Soviet bloc had similar sporting factories: athletes were political tools to fuel Party support at home and be played like pawns on the ideological front of the Cold War.

The 1966-76 Cultural Revolution under Mao Zedong split Ju Dan's family for much of her childhood. Her mother, who was a well-known actress, was sent to the army to be "re-educated".

Her father, Ju Fen Kang, abandoned life in the capital due to political pressures, to coach the Shandong provincial team. When Ju Dan was seven, she and her baby sister Ju Li followed him to Jinan.

After three years' separation, her mother was allowed to return to Beijing where she was reunited with her daughters: they shared a 9-sq-metre room in a two-room apartment with another family. Her father stayed on in Shandong because he didn't have the necessary papers to return to the capital.

From age 11, over about 12 years, Ju Dan was honed into a world class athlete, undertaking exhaustive daily workouts and stark living conditions to become a professional sportswoman.

Her routine would start at 6 a.m. and finish at 9 p.m. The girls slept six to a room on beds that had wooden slabs for a mattress and only cold water showers in the dormitories.

"I don't have happy memories of the school," she told me. "I felt more of prisoner than player."

BASKETBALL DYNASTY

She made several unsuccessful attempts to quit the game, and the sports committee reluctantly permitted her to retire in 1985 at age 22. By then she had five national basketball championships to her credit.