That's interesting. To my experience, in Asian countries --- at least in China, popular students are usually those who with higher grades. Physical education is only considered as a very small part of the school and usually not an important one. That's probably why Asian students are not as tall/strong as their U.S. (may be Europe?) peers.
Actually had this point made to me by some frat boy who wanted to basically hire me to do his part of a graduation project (we were both CE majors, you had to come up with something patentable to graduate, basically).
The rest of the story sounds unrealistic, so I won't relate it here lest I be modded down.
