For China's short track speed skating group portrait, for ordinary people's dreams to give shape

Li Jia

On the evening of January 9, the TV series "Beyond" officially met with the audience. In 18 months, my writing team and I didn't know the rules of short-track speed skating, and today we have seen this group of fictional characters come alive on the screen, which is a very "transcendent" thing in itself.

The birth of Beyond is a challenging thematic creation. In order to prepare for the Beijing Winter Olympics, all of us have broken through our personal past experience, and have received guidance from the State Administration of Radio and Television, and the support of the State General Administration of Sports, the Beijing Winter Olympics Organizing Committee and other parties. I think that if it weren't for this opportunity, I might never have had the opportunity to learn about and dig into such a special subject as short track speed skating. But once this door was opened, I felt like I had found a treasure.

In fact, at the beginning, our proposition did not lock the subject area on the short track speed skating project, but we can freely choose any ice and snow sports related to the Beijing Winter Olympics, and even not limited to competitions and competitions, showing the story of ordinary people participating in ice and snow sports and ice and snow economy in the context of the Winter Olympics. But after an early planning argument, we and the production team decided to position the main genre of the series on professional competitive sports.

Insisting on the competitive sports genre is to make the theme creation more close to the audience, more artistic and watchable. Under the leadership of the TV Drama Division, our team went to the Beijing Winter Olympics Organizing Committee to investigate, understand the history and characteristics of each ice and snow project, and after rational analysis, gradually narrowed the scope of topic selection, and finally focused on the field of short track speed skating. In all the Winter Olympic events, short track speed skating has always been our main gold medal, as of the 2018 PyeongChang Winter Olympics, 10 of the 13 Winter Olympic gold medals in the history of the Chinese team have been won by the short track speed skating team. Since the introduction of short track projects into China in the 1980s, China's short track speed skating professional team has had a very deep inheritance and heritage after several generations of construction, and there are enough rich creative materials to explore. But at the same time, the high-speed movement on the ice at a speed of up to 50 kilometers per hour undoubtedly adds greater difficulty to the already challenging countdown shooting task, which requires that every step of our creation must be meticulous and efficient.

In order to understand the theme as soon as possible, our screenwriting team went deep into the Heilongjiang Provincial Team and the Qingdao Team to observe and experience life, spent three months intensively collecting styles, and then continued to supplement the research in the whole process of creation. We interviewed nearly 100 people in the short track speed skating field, covering athletes, coaches, referees, team doctors, equipment dealers and other characters, forming more than 600,000 words of interview material, on the basis of such understanding, gradually generated the "Beyond" characters and stories that everyone sees now.

I still remember when we first learned about this field, we were deeply touched by the fate stories of legends such as Yang Yang and Li Yan. But as we interviewed more people and learned more about the history of the project, the more determined we became to have the idea of not making any personal biographies, but creating entirely new fictional characters based on real historical backgrounds and realistic evidence in typical situations in the short-track speed skating industry. What we want to write about is the historical changes in short track speed skating in China over the past 30 years and the people in it. All the characters in the story do not have a direct corresponding archetype, but the contradictions in them all reflect a general sense of destiny. For example, the experience of the protagonist Chen Mian 'rotating ice', although it is not very common among short track speed skaters, is by no means out of nothing, and an Kai, Li Xuan and other members of the Qingdao team have similar growth experiences. For example, Chen Mian's background and father-daughter emotional entanglement are completely fictional, but the two generations have a common ice and snow complex and a family inheritance of the same cause, which is a very common situation in this industry. We wanted to write a protagonist whose growth path is slightly different from most of the champions. She switched from roller skating, started late, and her talent was short, but she relied on her tenacious character and persistence to create miracles and surpass the so-called "talent" theory. This character is more legendary on the basis of reality, slightly idealized than reality, and I think it can pin the dreams of ordinary people and ordinary audiences more.

The protagonist Chen Mian has a prototype, but she is not the only protagonist. Among all the interviewees, I found that what moved me the most was often not the story of how the champions won the championship, but the regrets, helplessness, dilemmas, and finally willingness to make sacrifices and complete others on the road of their own struggles. The past beyond the real aura repeatedly impacts us, and relevant experts also suggest that we should open our horizons and pay more attention to most ordinary people in the entire competitive sports who have not reached the peak. Champions are always a minority, but behind a champion, there are countless unsung behind-the-scenes heroes supporting it. Therefore, our thinking has shifted from building a core character relationship around the most promising champions to shaping a group portrait of the entire Chinese short track speed skating industry.

As our horizons opened, we gradually distilled similar themes from the many life stories we listened to. We found that almost all middle-aged coaches have a moving past behind them. They were all close to their championship dreams in their youth, but for various reasons, they lost a key opportunity that may only appear once in their lives. Some have been injured, some have missed their age, and many have made sacrifices to complete their teammates. In terms of athletic performance, these athletes may be "less successful." But when they go through a mental journey, most of them still don't give up this ice, choosing to go behind the scenes to become a coach and continue to pay for short track for the rest of their lives, who can simply define their careers in the secular sense of success. In particular, we also found that they often invested more in teaching than they invested in their own small families, and their gaze on their disciples often exceeded that of their own children. It can be said that along the way, they must have the word "sacrifice" in the theme words of their lives with short track speed skating.

I feel that the theme of "sacrifice" actually accompanies the whole short track speed skating story, in which there is often a trade-off between the realization of the individual achievements of athletes and the mission responsibilities they carry as bearers of national honor. The different ways of answering this trade-off have distinguished the competitive views of Chinese sports people and Chinese society for more than 30 years. This is actually a succession of Chinese values over the past 30 years, reflecting the changes and development of the times in China as a whole.

Under the framework of winning glory for the country and personal growth, the three generations of short track speed skaters have inherited the fighting spirit of self-improvement, and the values of two generations of athletes have collided and evolved, and there is an iterative tension in this continuation, so that we finally found the main structural form and theme expression of "Beyond". As a result, our story has evolved from the original sports youth story about the passionate struggle and growth of the young generation of athletes to the current dual-time and space pattern, beyond the competition, and the sports life story of the times.

Whether it's short-track speed skating or competitive sports, in my opinion, it's all a metaphor. In fact, sports competition is the best metaphor for the struggle and growth of people in all industries and destinies. The Olympic motto: faster, higher, stronger, more united, these indicators all summarize the same pursuit, that is, "transcendence". Sport is the most externalized expression of the spirit of struggle of human beings to pursue continuous transcendence.

Rather than transcendence on the field, we love the process of each person transcending themselves, transcending the past, and realizing true value in their own lives. I think at this point, I'm very passionate about sports.

(The author is the chief screenwriter of the TV series "Beyond")

Source: Wen Wei Po