She is the representative of "skating" and "Winter Olympics" in the hearts of Chinese, her name is closely related to ice and snow sports, and her life trajectory is also intertwined with it.
In this issue of Wonder Women, we approach Yang Yang, it is she who achieved a breakthrough of zero gold medals in the Chinese Winter Olympics, 20 years ago, the Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, usa, she proved herself to the world, proved China. Twenty years later, she was the chairman of the Athletes' Committee of the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics Organizing Committee. The world is looking to China.
ELLE, World Fashion Garden, February 2022
Red patent leather coat, red turtleneck dress
Both are the Michael Kors Collection
Black leather tops, black leather pants
Both are Givenchy
Etincelle de Cartier 18K white gold, diamond earrings Cartier
Skates Yang Yang's personal belongings
Over the years, Yang Yang has been active in and out of the arena, traveling to major international sports organizations to popularize ice and snow sports education, and she humbly described herself as a "volunteer who wants to play some role." "She has her own unique understanding of sport and firmly believes that the Olympic spirit has the inspiring power to bring beauty and hope to life in the cold winters."
The surrounding staff said that Yang Yang was a complete "heroine", comfortable, bold, righteous, dashing... The words describing the hero in these martial arts novels can be interpreted by her personality. When she was a child, she protected her teammates and stood up to "educate" the bullying guys, and when she grew up, she also rushed forward with a lot of energy, unconvinced, stood on the international arena again and again, and won 59 world championships, including the first gold medal in the history of the Chinese Winter Olympics.
She said that she really likes to read martial arts novels, and her favorite is Mr. Jin Yong's Qiao Feng, a generation of heroes born in the north and coming to Jiangnan.
In 1975, Yang Yang was born in the small county town of Jiamusi, Fudi, Heilongjiang, which is right on the Sanjiang Plain formed by the confluence of the Songhua River, Heilongjiang And Ussuri River. Skating is an important picture of the construction of the generation's winter childhood memories, when the northern children will skate: "In the winter, each school splashes the ice by itself, this is the work of the physical education teacher, we did not have equipment at that time, even the skates were a wooden board, tied to the bottom of the ice knife, some ice knives have no blades, but it does not matter, directly tied to the cotton shoes." These distant memories Yang Yang is still very excited to say now, just like what happened yesterday.
From officially receiving professional skating training in 1984 to being selected for the national training team in 1993, from Jiamusi to Qitaihe, to the provincial capital of Harbin, and then to Beijing, Yang Yang was 18 years old. After five years of rigorous training for the national team, yang Yang participated in the Winter Olympics for the first time in 1998, in the Nagano Short Track Speed Skating Competition in Japan, two individual events 500 meters and 1000 meters were judged to be foul canceled, of which in the semi-final of the 1000 meters, she broke the world record, the first to rush to the finish line in the final, but a minute later was judged fouled, canceled results... In the end, she only won the silver medal in the women's 3000m relay at the Nagano Winter Olympics. After a period of evasion and struggle after the game, she finally decided to face the failure, meet the future, and after thinking hard, summarize the experience and lessons in the failure, understand the law of the project, and let the failure become the cornerstone of her take-off.
Between 1997 and 2002, she won the World Cup and World Championship all-around for 6 consecutive years... This period of time is also the golden stage of Yang Yang's sports status constantly improving and climbing, and gold medals in international heavyweight events have been successively collected by her. Four years passed, another Winter Olympics came, she proved herself in Salt Lake City in 2002, and also proved the Chinese team, opening a new chapter in the history of the Chinese Winter Olympics.
White blazer Max Mara
White suit pants Maison Margiela
In that pre-information age without the Internet, the family sat around the TV to watch this scene recorded in history, Yang Yang's name became synonymous with "skating" and "Winter Olympics" in the hearts of generations, and "Ice Queen" became her lingering title and the most eye-catching label at that time.
In August 2006, just a week before her 31st birthday, Yang Yang held a retirement ceremony in Beijing. At the Winter Olympics in Turin at the beginning of the year, she won a bronze medal in short track speed skating for 1,000 meters. Every athlete has to come to this crossroads and face this watershed in life, even the "Queen of Ice".
There is still a long way to go in life, but what can you do? Yang Yang expressed the confusion of that year: "When I was an athlete, I had a clear goal, to stand on the world's highest podium, no matter how boring and tired the training will become because of this dream. But after retiring, suddenly the goal is no longer clear, although excellent athletes seem to have many opportunities, but which is right for me? Which one makes my blood boil every day like before? When looking for answers, I found that compared with excellent athletes, the problem of ordinary athletes is that there are too few opportunities, from life, social resources to cognition are very closed. But again, they don't want to live a mediocre life, and they hope that there is one more thing in their future life that will make them feel hot. ”
Brown casual top Hermès
Earrings Fendi
Where to go to find answers? How can you find the direction and purpose of your next life?
In fact, Yang Yang can take a particularly simple path - obey the arrangement, stay in the national team or enter an administrative position in a more systematic system, and become a civil servant holding an iron rice bowl and living a stable life. "But I prefer a future that's a little bit uncertain and a bit challenging." She answered with particular firmness. "I'm very clear about what I don't want, but I'm not clear about what I want." Confusion and confusion were the most profound feelings of Yang Yang when he first retired. After a period of trouble, she decided to go out and try out what different opportunities had brought her. Shortly after his official retirement, Yang Yang went to Africa, "I donated the bronze medal I won for the last time I participated in the Olympic Games to the international organization that popularized sports activities for young children, which was founded by my childhood idol and Norwegian athlete who won four Olympic gold medals." "She played with local African children as a volunteer, played blind ball with blind children blindfolded, set up simple goals with bricks, and designed appropriate sports activities for disabled children in rehabilitation centers... "For the first time, I felt the power of sports outside the arena." Yang Yang said. Perhaps the moment of "running away" and donating the last medal of her career was an invisible "watershed" in the darkness of her life, she put down some, and found some more. The road became clearer and clearer as it walked under her feet.
What is sportsmanship? After leaving the arena, Yang Yang has been wondering, what has sports taught himself over the years? "(It)is ideal in this world, where the rules are transparent, the competition is fair, there is no discrimination, there is mutual respect, but this is not exactly the case in this world." The real world is far more complicated, and the sense of purity that once could be achieved by just working hard and just working hard is precious in the quagmire of the real world. "Because of this, the Olympics are very precious in this world. It gives people the opportunity not to give up hope and to truly appreciate what it means to be respectful, to communicate with each other, to be fair and just. In the Olympic Games, you see a beautiful world, which will affect more people, which is what I think is the greatest value of the Olympic Games. ”
Therefore, Yang Yang wanted to understand that she wanted to live out the ideal of a female heroine in reality with this preciousness.
A year after retiring from the military, she completed her studies at the School of Economics and Management of Tsinghua University. The year after her retirement, during the Wenchuan earthquake, she joined hands with Tsinghua alumni to establish the Polaris Charity Foundation. Initially as a construction aid project in Beijing, it carried out physical education teacher training and donated sports facilities in Shifang City, Sichuan Province. Four years after her retirement, she was elected as China's first IOC member with an absolute margin of 89 votes in favour. In 2009, she founded the "Champion Fund", which has trained nearly 3,000 athletes, provided counseling for more than 500 athletes, and provided internship opportunities for more than 100 athletes.
Recalling the girl from the northeast, although she had an excellent sense of ice, she could not speak a word of English at that time, was elected as a member of the International Skating Federation Athletes Committee, later gritted her teeth to learn language, and then entered the International Olympic Committee as a member, and now the vice president of the World Anti-Doping Agency, Yang Yang has successfully crossed the curve of life and completed the transformation.
Trench coats and white shirts are DIOR
In the 125-year history of the International Skating Federation, Yang Yang is the first female speed skating director to be elected. There are too many "first" titles on her body, and now for her, the athletes' committee chairman of the Beijing Winter Olympics Organizing Committee is one of her most valued identities. After so many years of struggle on the Olympic road and in the field of sports, accumulating so much experience, "I finally have the opportunity to use what I have learned in international organizations in my own country to serve our Olympic Games!" This is the reason why Yang Yang is full of enthusiasm no matter how busy he faces the pre-race sprint work.
Six years ago, during the bid for the Winter Olympics, Yang Yang found herself pregnant with her second child, when she was working on the bidding committee, responsible for receiving the evaluation committee's week-long evaluation, "I sat in the meeting and sweated, others were dressed quite thickly, I wore very little, I felt very hot, and then my colleague asked me if I was nervous, I said impossible!" I had a meeting with them last week. After that, I climbed the mountain to investigate, took a bus to investigate, and drove to Chongli for three or four hours to make me dizzy. When they were gone, I went to check and found that I was pregnant with my second son. Looking at the photos of the bidding period, the 7 months pregnant feels thinner than it is now. ”
This year, Yang Yang's daughter is six years old, three years away from her brother, Yang Yang said that looking at her feels like seeing herself when she was a child: "I myself may have left home early because of my father's death, and I left home early, so I often show leo to the outside world to be strong, and I don't like to show weakness and petite." The daughter is a mini Yang Yang who releases her nature, loves to be angry, and is also extremely self-disciplined, and the teacher reflected with Yang Yang at the parent-teacher meeting that this is "the only brave girl in the class who can stand up and let those naughty boys stop." "Others say that her daughter's heroine personality is exactly the same as Yang Yang's.
Beijing's Winter Olympics have also "grown" rapidly in six years, from the vision of several generations to the global event that is about to open, Yang Yang has changed from a ignorant and arrogant young man on the ice rink to a promoter leading the continuous progress of China's ice and snow sports, and her youth is closely intertwined with the development of China's ice and snow sports.
"Needless to say, in my generation, until the last PyeongChang Winter Olympics, we had 1/3 of the projects that had not yet been carried out, including snow mountain bobsleigh, alpine skiing and many other sports. After this bid, we have completed the construction of the whole project. In recent years, through cross-border material selection, like some skill projects, gymnastics and diving are similar to athletes who have practiced skills from an early age to do cross-border training. Some track and field athletes go to practice bobsleigh, because sprinters start quickly, so although some of the events in China are participating in the Winter Olympics for the first time, there are also opportunities to compete for medals.
"Let 300 million people participate in ice and snow sports", this is not a slogan, but Yang Yang's confidence. She recalled her childhood, the school playground that splashed water into ice, the smiles on every classmate's face when they skated, the wind was particularly cold, but the exercise warmed everyone up. Now, more and more ice rinks have been built in the city, and there are more and more snow fields in the mountains in the north, and the diversified sports methods stimulate the vitality of the city and society.
White knight's suit, blue patent leather pants, black western boots
Both are Louis Vuitton
Perlée Clovers rose gold diamond ring,
White gold diamond ring
Both are Van Cleef & Arpels
Behind the title of a series of international institutions, Yang Yang still remembers to skate, just skate, not only she skates herself, but also with her children, and then let more children come together.
After retiring from the army, she moved to Shanghai and became a northeasterner living in the south. In 2013, Yang Yang did a particularly grounded thing, she founded the Feiyang Ice Sports Center in Shanghai, which is the country's premier professional and open ice rink to the public. At the opening, Yang Yang posted a paragraph on Weibo: "Growing up on the ice rink in 23 years, from stumbling to free driving, I understand that the ideal is not only a beautiful vision, it means paying, suffering, failure, and even sacrifice, and insisting on it means good memories." ”
"When it was founded, many people doubted that I could run for a few months, and for the first time I asked the principals of 19 surrounding schools to recommend ice sports, and everyone heard that there were knives and ice, and they were frightened." Later, a school for the children of migrant workers was willing to try bravely. The venue has been established for more than eight years, and Yang Yang has reached his own low standard, "Survived, I am considered solid."
More than 8 years later, there have been fierce international ice hockey battles, figure skating, short track speed skating events in her own projects, and the unpopular Asia Pacific Curling Championships... A southern city has the cold of ice. However, Yang Yang's most concerned is the small students here, there are many children who are even younger than she was when they went to the ice rink, fell, climbed up and continued to slide. Yang Yang looked at them and thought, maybe this kid is the next Wu Dajing, maybe the children here can produce a national relay team, or don't expect so much, they may not be champions but they can fall in love with skating, love sports, so they have a healthy, happy and interesting life.
In her view, if a city has a sports atmosphere, the city is vibrant, and sports and life are closely integrated, which is also the prototype of a sports power. Just like the martial arts drama said that "the hero is the greatest, for the country and the people", Yang Yang is also like the hero she admires, in china's ice and snow sports, has been working hard, as big as the national winter Olympics, as small as an ice rink.
Sometimes, when she is tired, she will still go to the ice to skate twice, and she still looks proud when she mentions the "ice feeling" that we laymen do not understand. On the day of the shooting, she brought a pair of exclusive and unique skates, wearing fashionable clothes, and Yang Yang, who stepped on the skates, was very sassy. After finishing the shooting, Yang Yang hurried to do a live broadcast of the Winter Olympics, and recently she was really too busy, and every minute after the countdown to the Winter Olympics began, she seemed to be in a sprint state of sliding towards the finish line. Yang Yang also admitted that sometimes it is very tired, but this is what she likes, she has found, can always do what she likes and is good at, very lucky and happy.
"Seize the time to be yourself." Yang Yang said.
Producer: Nicole Xue
Producer: Wu Zhen
Curated by: ELLE Thematic Group
Photo by KAI Z FENG Zhikai
Styling: WangAn
Video Director: Yushu Wang
Associate Director: Cecilia Yuan He
Video shooting: Ruihuan Li
Executive Producer/Editor: Hsiangyu Cheng
Makeup: Jiang Na
Hairstyle: Jason
Nail art: Kang Kang
Interview/Author: LX
Producer: Sissi Chen
Edit: Sherry
Fashion Assistants: Li Bingyi, Wang Jiayi
Photography assistants: Xie Miaowei, Li Chengze
Studios and equipment: WStudios
WeChat design: Zhang Yan
WeChat Editor: Tiffany