Two 15-year-old athletes at a Chinese sports training center scalded younger teammates with boiling water and committed other acts of abuse, state media reported yesterday, sparking outrage online.
The incident has shined a light on an opaque Chinese state sports system which has long had a reputation for pushing competitors, including children, to extremes.
The two unnamed athletes were suspended from the Hebei Province gymnastics, judo and weightlifting sports center, Xinhua news agency said.
Their five victims were about the age of 10 and the incident happened in September last year, it said.
The Beijing News published on its Web site video footage of a young boy with his skin peeled off below his neck from boiling water.
The boy’s mother said in the video that the skin on his face had also peeled off and he was bruised.
“Heartache does not even describe our feelings,” said the woman, identified only by her surname, Qiao (喬).
She said that the two teenagers had also stuffed egg yolks into the victims’ noses and burnt their buttocks with a cigarette lighter.
The alleged abuse was widely condemned on the Sina Weibo microblogging platform, with many users calling for the perpetrators to be arrested or banned from competition for life.
Others hit out at what they said was the Hebei sports authorities’ slow handling of the case, with details only emerging now, despite the incidents happening six months ago.
Under China’s rigid state sports system, many athletes believed to have potential are plucked from their families at an early age and put through grueling training regimes.
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