I think this should be something that bothers us, we do not accept and take on as an issue. When Germany performed really badly in football at the Euro 2000 and 04 (and lucked through the WC 02), it changed the team, reformed the whole system and has since had an all-German Champions League final, a World Cup win and consecutively reached every semifinal in every WC and Euro. Similarly, England pumped a ton of money into sports to score at its Olympics in London and it sure did.
(Western) Europe likes to discount these achievements by pointing at tiger moms and authoritarian education for Asia and elitist, overly performance centric instead of humanist education for America. While there is probably some truth to that and I do not think we have to change our whole system, I do not buy that Asians are simply geniuses. We should value achievements like this a bit higher and we can and should probably do a bit better even with European genes.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_International_Mathemat...
There's also a lot of top mathematicians that failed miserably at the imo.
I think some fields in math are very close to this style of problems while others are so alien that good scores at the imo are a useless predictor of success for those fields.
Knowing more than a few people who grew up in that area prior to the 1990's I think it is interesting how engineering was seen as such as a prestigious career.
Many children were encouraged to study math because it was seen as a pathway to that kind of career. I think there is some similarities with at least China and Singapore - I've had a number of Chinese interns who were encouraged to do math competitions as a pathway to Computer Science.