You've illuminated a good point that I completely failed to make: transplanting bits and pieces of a system into a different context often fails. The totality of a system matters. Especially in complex systems where the graph of causality is very vague.
My hobby is Olympic-style weightlifting. One thing that happens a lot in my sport is cargo-culting whichever country happens to be dominant at the moment. Back in the 1990s everyone got very excited about the "Bulgarian" training system, which was quite different from the "Russian" system which had dominated from the 60s.
In the USA in particular, wholesale attempts were made to adopt the Bulgarian system for elite athletes. Results? Very disappointing.
The context is wildly different. Bulgarian coaches had a feedstock of hundreds of thousands of lifters. If a lifter was wrecked by the extremely aggressive Bulgarian method, so what? You just replaced him with another lifter, there were plenty more coming up the pipeline. Given that in a larger sample you can find more outliers, mere numbers predicted a large fraction of the Bulgarian success -- and before that the Russian success.
Mere numbers today predict the success of China in the lighter divisions; mere numbers in future will predict that China will steadily improve in the heavier divisions as Chinese youth become taller due to westernised diets with more protein and calcium.
But the cargo culting has begun. Weightlifters already talk about "the Chinese System" as if there was some single, monolithic master plan. There isn't really. There's just a metric shit ton of Chinese weightlifters in the lower leagues and the elite international coaches can pick out the best of the best.
For the same reason, New Zealand is rugby superpower, nobody can beat the USA at gridiron, Australia is barred from entering the international Australian Rules Football contest because even our lowliest semi-pros dominate any such match up ...
I do agree with your assessment of the sizes of the talent pools in Russia, USA and China. Back of the envelope calculations don't support your assessment of the Bulgarian talent pools though.
Your assumption that the Bulgarian coaches have a feedstock of hundreds of thousands of lifters is very far from the truth - the whole Bulgarian population is considered to be around 7.3M people, which doesn't account very well for all emigrants living abroad. Out of these 7.3M only 16% (~1M) are aged 0-17 (I assume that 14-15 y/o is the usual age that a lifter starts training professionally). That means that at the moment there are around 100K teenagers (aged 14-15), out of which less than 50K are male.
During the past 20 years sports have lost a big chunk of their (state) funding and therefore the attractiveness for young uneducated kids have lowered substantially, further reducing the pool of athletes.
I consider the three most prestigious and popular sports for males in Bulgaria to be football (soccer), wrestling and weight-lifting.
I'm actually having trouble nailing down a source for where I got the 200k number. It was for total registered lifters at all levels, including youth, juniors, seniors and masters. When a sport is popular in a country, it's played at all ages.
Meanwhile the USA had, until Crossfit, about 3,000 lifters. Not a very big pool to draw from.
You correctly point out that state funding for Olympic sports collapsed some time back and that this removed the quasi-professional pathway.
For a similar reason, few athletes in the anglosphere who is naturally strong and power will go into weightlifting. They're playing gridiron or rugby. Those sports are popular and have lucrative professional leagues.
I usually leave doping out of the discussion because it's not a point of distinction. Most dominant countries have doping programs. It just seems as though the Bulgarians are particularly inept at planning their steroid cycles to avoid detection at international meetings. Or possibly Ivan Abadjiev doesn't care how he loses lifters -- whether through quitting, injury or doping charges.
My hobby is Olympic-style weightlifting. One thing that happens a lot in my sport is cargo-culting whichever country happens to be dominant at the moment. Back in the 1990s everyone got very excited about the "Bulgarian" training system, which was quite different from the "Russian" system which had dominated from the 60s.
In the USA in particular, wholesale attempts were made to adopt the Bulgarian system for elite athletes. Results? Very disappointing.
The context is wildly different. Bulgarian coaches had a feedstock of hundreds of thousands of lifters. If a lifter was wrecked by the extremely aggressive Bulgarian method, so what? You just replaced him with another lifter, there were plenty more coming up the pipeline. Given that in a larger sample you can find more outliers, mere numbers predicted a large fraction of the Bulgarian success -- and before that the Russian success.
Mere numbers today predict the success of China in the lighter divisions; mere numbers in future will predict that China will steadily improve in the heavier divisions as Chinese youth become taller due to westernised diets with more protein and calcium.
But the cargo culting has begun. Weightlifters already talk about "the Chinese System" as if there was some single, monolithic master plan. There isn't really. There's just a metric shit ton of Chinese weightlifters in the lower leagues and the elite international coaches can pick out the best of the best.
For the same reason, New Zealand is rugby superpower, nobody can beat the USA at gridiron, Australia is barred from entering the international Australian Rules Football contest because even our lowliest semi-pros dominate any such match up ...