Why Taiwan Can't Compete Under Its Own Name

Chinese Taipei is at the Olympics this year. It also doesn't exist.

How this video happened

Initially, this video was an attempt to get more Olympics juice in the system, and it still is that — even though I'm not a sports guy, my last video made me intrigued by the weirdness of the Olympics. And people are interested.

I have literally no recollection of how I landed on Chinese Taipei as a topic, though I think it was probably inspired by reading David Kanin's history of the Olympics and politics. But I had no idea how complicated things were, and how emotional I'd find the stories to be.

Most of that is due to Andrew D. Morris, whose papers really did make me care about these Taiwanese sports stories (and have made me tempted to do a story about baseball in Taiwan). There's a lot of drama in a name.

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Here's a link to the reaction video (for some paid tiers). I didn't send out a separate notification for this, let me know if that's a problem.

Please make "The Teammates" a movie

The drama between Taiwan and China is a century-spanning global one, but within that is, somewhere, a story that's about as intimate as you could hope for: two friends, and a mentor who guided both of them.

This article is premised on the idea of making the story of athletes CK Yang and Rafer Johnson, and their UCLA coach Elvin "Ducky" Drake, into an Oscar-winning film (or maybe a heartwarming Disney movie, at the very least). This group has so much depth and texture that there must be something there.

The timeline is a clear one that ends with the 1960 Decathlon showdown I mention in the video above: C.K. Yang and Rafer Johnson were both teammates at UCLA, and Ducky Drake was their coach (I won't condescend to explain the nickname, I think you've got this one). They became friends, though whether it was unlikely or destined seems like a coin flip to me. You could find it strange that a Californian and "Formosan" would become best buds, or it could seem obvious that two track stars who were minorities in their own countries would find some common ground.

Ducky Drake was the glue for both young men — through his many years as head coach at UCLA he wasn't known for yelling, but for listening. He was the "Father Confessor" to his many athletes and was trusted not just as a coach, but as a paternal guide through the rough years of college. His obituary is filled with such testimonies.

And, in addition, CK Yang was forced to flee to the hillsides and kill cobras during World War II! Rafer Johnson became a movie star and tackled Sirhan Sirhan to the ground after the assassination of Rober Kennedy. Ducky Drake? He has a stadium named after him now. Oh, and did I mention that CK was in movies before becoming a politician and a shaman?

But while that last paragraph is great grist for the credits-adjacent slideshow that runs in movies like these, figuring out the real story is a little harder than that. People sometimes tell me ideas for stories and I have to smile while thinking, "but what's the story?" The truth is, this is a bit of the same situation: all of these men are so stuffed with incredible anecdotes that it's tough to know where a clear narrative begins. Factoids are fun to know but they don't teach beyond whatever trivia they state.

Still, I think this audio recording of a banquet, at which CK and Rafer talked about the 1960 Olympics, hints at some possible structure for the video. While Drake was both men's coach at UCLA, the Republic of China actually hired him to coach Yang at Rome in 1960. So while Drake provided advice to Johnson (and corresponding advice to Yang), he was actually Yang's coach in that role. So he had his own entanglement in geopolitical pole vaulting, sprinting, and long jumping.

So maybe there's some sort of story in that tension — how do these men, under enormous pressure to represent their countries, manage to stay friends? And how does a person choose between nationalism and the stateless excellence that a decathlon requires, both for athlete and coach? The evidence supports that each one of them contained a lot of complex emotions about the world, their role in it, and how athleticism interacted with all that. Maybe the 10 events of the Decathlon, and the shifting fortunes of each man with each event, could play into it.

Still, I can't solve the structure of this movie with this glance of the article, perhaps because all three men lived such exhaustingly full lives that the constraints of narrative feel like a rip off.

But you can't argue with a location shoot in Rome, can you?

Sources for the video

This is a very paper-heavy edition. If you have any trouble reading these, feel free to get in touch with me and I can either help you with the dark arts of paper acquisition or send a copy over.

I'm writing this now and realizing it might seem a bit insanely long as a source list. But I have been prioritizing research for a while in my production calendar—typically I spend a week writing and downloading assets, and only then do I crash hard on the production side. I'm very curious how much of this info I'll retain in a few months. If you ever see me, quiz me on a summer Olympic year from 1930-2020 and see if I still remember it.

• Thank you to Andrew for chatting with me. Something like this really requires a chat with an expert, and while I wish I'd made even more time for it, Andrew was very generous with his. His paper about CK Yang is just...an insane ride. I also used his overview here, this paper describing the early Olympic days, and this one that describes the 1932 and 1936 Olympics (another great story I shortchange in the video, like CK Yang's).

• I read a few papers from the 80s that provided me with some more contemporary analysis of the two China/one China issue. Ended up not really getting into that a ton (the Olympics controversies were enough), but you can read some here: Gerald Chan's paper, J Bruce Jacobs' paper, and Andrew Scobell's paper.

• This paper about 1952 in Helsinki was really good and had a lot of unique sources. I guess I didn't use a ton from it, but it was pretty exciting to read.

• I believe this nice summary is where I got the bobsledding example, and it shows how I generally am strip-mining all these papers for interesting visuals. The same author gave me the World Games too. I'm literally realizing right now that I left this out of the video. Oh well! It didn't superly push forward the story, but it is kinda insane that the World Games was held in Taiwan, but they had to call it "Chinese Taipei" officially.

• The LA84 foundation is where you find a ton of reports about the Olympics. I'm not saying I read all these, of course, but they provide nice evidence and context, as well as visuals that are more legit to use than ones from the Olympics (I try to be pretty careful in what I clip from broadcasts, following fair use guidelines).

• Oh, here's Rafer Johnson's book. I'm only human; I didn't read it, I just confirmed the story. Nevertheless, I kinda want to. This man was in a James Bond movie!

Let me know if there are any specific clips you'd like, though most can be found via some Googling.