Wait so is it a celebration of excellence or a just a commercial thing where the goal is simply to drive ticket sales? Because what you described was people putting on a show but ultimately acting out a script, like pro wrestling.
I would say you are getting to the core of the issue: conflicting expectations and interests among the IOC, the hosting country, the sponsors, the individual athletes, the national teams, the spectators both at home and at the venue:
- the IOC, the hosting country, and the sponsors probably want the spectators to think that the games are about celebration of (personal) excellence, so they say forfeiting outright is bad sportsmanship; also, athletes putting up a fight is more exciting and sells more tickets.
- at the same time, watching the medal count ranking is exciting; at least in the case of China, I believe that most people expect the national team *as a whole* to do everything they can to fetch more medals; for some people, the ability of the coach to strategize is part of the show;
- the individual athlete of course wants a gold for themself if possible, but they also kinda have to keep in mind the hopes of the people, which is "more medals *for the country*";
And you may ask "but then why don't we just allow everybody to dope? Doping makes athletes strong/faster and should result in more exciting games if everybody dopes." I would guess it's because any form of doping is probably detrimental to the human body in the long term, which makes it an obvious bad image. Besides, it's possible that doping makes your athlete "expire" sooner, and so maybe it's just not a good deal for national teams to have to do short cycles of discovering talents and training them. I'm not saying this is the case, I'm just hypothesizing out loud.
And so, given the above factors, we have this weird situation where the IOC says you shouldn't forfeit, but could "turn a blind eye" if you can put up a convincing show of a fight. I'm just hypothesizing how this happens. And I'm not making any conclusion about whether this whole thing is ethical. I'm just laying out the forces at work.
It is still somewhat unlike pro-wrestling because the national teams are really competing against each other. Within each national team, however, it may be a different story.
It seems likely that they would have been disqualified if they would have disclosed their coercive tactics. The fakery was necessary in order to get the desired outcome.
Right, if I correctly understand the page you linked, this concern about competition manipulation is relatively recent (less than 10 years ago), while the "scandal" surrounding Ye happened 20 years ago.
Keeping in mind that the scandal was known since at least as early as 2007 (according to the link pasted on another comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32670518), the IOC should have had plenty of time to investigate, if they wanted to. If I understand correctly, the IOC has not (yet) stripped any of the involved athletes of their medals, nor taken any other disciplinary action against individual athletes or the national team. This suggests that either the competition manipulation rules were not in place (in which case the Chinese team would have been still operating within the rules, strictly speaking), or the IOC didn't mean to really enforce such rules, possibly due to consideration for other interests.
I'll also add that, from the perspective of the Chinese government, athletes in the national team are basically in the service of the country because the country is usually paying for all the training, equipment, etc., and so personal sacrifices are expected. This is something any athlete joining the national team is expected to understand. Put another way, if an athlete does not agree with that, they are not supposed to join the national team to begin with. So in the eyes of some people, Ye simply didn't expect she would actually need to make that sacrifice, and got bitter about it.
And if you think the practice is unethical, I would tell you that China is simply operating from a completely different frame of ethical reference.
For China, every sport in the Olympics is a team sport, even the ones that are not explicitly described as such. While showing sportsmanship is kinda/sorta important, it is even more unethical to not do everything in one's power to respond to the hopes and expectations of the government (who provided the funding) and of the Chinese people - namely, medal count ranking. So if there is something that can be done as a team and that is not explicitly forbidden by the rules, you can bet that the Chinese team will do it even if it seems unethical to you. This should not surprise you when you consider the communist/socialist ideology, where individualism is frowned upon. In fact, they'll probably think that national teams who don't do it are being stupid.
