"While we have improved, we still lag behind the world's elite in reserve talent cultivation and grassroots promotion in some major events like cycling, and track and field," Sports Minister Liu Peng was quoted by China Daily as saying.
But the local folk clubs thrived on single acts, and their Monday nights were reserved for budding talent.
As I reached this sticky oasis however, I was duly informed that these treats were reserved for the "talent" – the real actors – and was directed towards the refreshments dedicated to the background artists.
Bars were scattered across the area and tables reserved for HBO talent sat center stage.
Serious and reserved, he had a talent for drawing, and in 1874 he went to Paris to study painting with Carolus-Duran, a fashionable society portraitist.
Beyond the free concerts on stages in the street, the festival's best talent was reserved for the paying customers, who flocked to concert halls surrounding the streets of the festival.
An emotional statement read: "Grimbles was our first-team goalkeeper, 23 years of age and a huge talent, quiet and reserved but a brilliant player with a huge potential to go further in the game.
It was Wilde himself who insisted on the interpenetration of his life and work, and their often vexed relationship to each other: his genius, as he so famously remarked, reserved for his life, his talent for his work merely.
Superman was not nearly as super as the big Legendary logo that flashed behind Thomas Tull, that company's chief executive, as he took the unusual step of introducing his company's movies, rather than sitting back in the reserved seats and applauding the talent.
But one medal is not why they build such deep reserves of talent.
