At the Beijing Winter Olympics, which opens on February 4, more than 170 athletes from the Chinese team will compete and shine on their respective fields. This winter, they have been waiting for a long time.
Of the 109 Winter Olympic events, the Chinese team will participate in 95 of them. Exploring human limits on ice and snow requires higher speeds than the Summer Olympics, which also means greater difficulty and more danger. But every athlete is extremely courageous, they are never satisfied, constantly trying to break the boundaries between speed and strength.
We focused on two top athletes in the ice and snow races, who are the absolute strongest in their respective fields, the world champions. They are young and have good faces, but they are equally adventurous, moving forward with a strong dissatisfaction with the present.
In their story, behind the genius is that everyone experiences success and failure countless times, and then stands on the top podium with a strong desire.
Wen | Congcong
Gu Ailing
Fear is what drives me forward
Gu Ailing is a well-deserved rising star in the field of freestyle skiing. In the eyes of outsiders, she is a genius, always holding two ski poles to jump, take off, flip and land without pressure.
At the age of 18, Gu Ailing successfully made a two-week flip of 1440 degrees while training in Austria. In just three seconds after the take-off, she flipped forward twice, and spun around for a full four weeks before landing smoothly, leaving a perfect arc in the air.
The gold medal won by Gu Ailing also seems to support the outside world's impression of her genius. Only 19 years old, she has not only won multiple ski World Cups and championships, but also the first athlete ever to win three medals in her debut at the Extreme Games. Every post-match interview, Gu Ailing always acted relaxed.
But in fact, every time he stood on the ski slope, Gu Ailing would be afraid. She said that I was also an ordinary child, although I often forgot this. After all, two weeks of flips 1440 degrees is a difficult move, and Olympic champion Sean White accidentally had an accident during an attempt in New Zealand in 2017, with his head hitting the edge of the U-shaped pool and stitching a full 62 stitches on his face. Before completing this action, Gu Ailing had also fallen down again and again, failing again and again. While training indoors, she once slammed heavily on the edge of the foam pool as she fell, her thighs were strained, bleeding a lot, and leaving a large bruise on the outside of her thighs.
But when she finished the action during the game, she excitedly described the feeling, like flying up, until the time she landed, still flying.
It is this fear that has always pushed Gu Ailing forward. Because she enjoys overcoming fear and tension and challenging an action that no one has ever done before. In Gu Ailing's past experience, this fear and dissatisfaction has always surrounded her.
When she first came into contact with skiing at the age of 3, she was bolder than other peers. Her mother left her alone on the ski slopes, and at the age of 4, she found that she could already slide in the woods by herself and learned to cat jump. At the age of 8, my mother suddenly realized that she was too fast, and she dared to come down straight from the top of the mountain alone. For safety reasons, her mother sent Gu Ailing to the ski team. Because the ski team has a professional instructor, she can be guaranteed her safety. But Gu Ailing chose the riskier freestyle skiing, and at the age of 9, she won the National Junior Ski Championship.
That feeling of freedom in the air, she says, is fantastic. What attracted her to freestyle skiing was that she could develop a lot of her own movements so that she could express her own attitude through free skiing. She is full of desire for difficult moves, many of which are considered to be only possible by boys, but Gu Ailing said that boys can do actions that girls can also challenge.
This never-ending personality has allowed her to experience many injuries. When she was 12 years old, she broke her collarbone, and now she has a protrusion to the touch. Before the 2021 World Championships, she broke her right hand again during training and was cast for a month.
But Gu Ailing wanted to make a jump that no one else could do. She began to learn to control herself with the inertia of her brain rather than her body. Before each jump, she would think about what it would look like countless times in her mind. What I'll see, what I'll think, what the sound of the wind will look like.
It was the fear that made Gu Ailing learn to recognize her body more rationally, which made her stand on the highest podium again and again in the field of freestyle skiing.
Gu Ailing's figure not only appears on the ski field, she is also a model. The genes of mixed Chinese and American descent allow her to have three-dimensional facial features. She was invited to Paris Fashion Week and put on those elaborate dresses, and Gu Ailing said she quickly understood that fashion has a lot of freedom and creativity similar to skiing, and it's an infinite world.
On social media, some people questioned whether Gu Ailing should be a good athlete. But she doesn't want to live with skiing, I even want to do anything that is not the right thing for athletes to do, and young people should have their own voice.
Gu Ailing responds to the controversy Image source Gu Ailing ins
Gu Ailing's pursuit of unlimited possibilities also allowed her to get an admission letter from Stanford in 2020. She said it was her dream for a decade. In order to train and study at the same time, Gu Ailing often writes homework in the car on the way to the ski resort. In the 2020 SAT exam, Gu Ailing could only find a European exam room because of training in the European snow field. The first day was in Italy and the second day was in Switzerland. On the day of the exam, because the car ordered by Rain Valley Ailing was delayed, in order to catch the exam, she ran a kilometer in the rain. Under such circumstances, she was still able to ensure that she could play and was admitted to Stanford.
This winter, Gu Ailing will once again prove infinite. This time, Gu Ailing, who has already joined the Chinese nationality, will represent the Chinese team in the Winter Olympics. It was a brave decision because it meant that she would need to leave her comfort zone and return home alone for training. She had to familiarize herself with the new snow quality and face the fall again and again.
But that dissatisfaction always pushed Gu Ailing forward, making her the sparkling look she is now. 19-year-old Gu Ailing has richer experiences and feelings than ordinary people. She is called a genius girl, standing on the podium again and again, but in fact, she will be afraid, cry, and will go all the way with fear. She wrote her heart in a letter, and in this letter, Gu Ailing had a lot to say to everyone.
Trusova
Impossible is possible
Trussova had long blonde hair. Her first public eye was at the 2018 World Junior Figure Skating Championships. The music began, and she walked and spun around on the ice rink in a short blue dress, embroidered with shiny patterns. The 14-year-old Salsa's dance steps were full of power, and when the competition was more than twenty seconds in progress, she got up and jumped, spun around in the air and landed on the ground, and the audience instantly boiled.
In this competition, Trusova became the first player in the world to complete two kinds of four-way jumping in the competition, and set two world records in the youth category in free skating and total points. After the game, the video quickly became popular on the Internet, and her appearance and dance posture were evaluated as Disney Elsa Princess Bensha, so fans liked to call her Sasha.
But Trusova's princess aura didn't just come from talent, she showed great ambition when she met her first coach at the age of nine. Her coach, Volkov, described her as not like to glide, not to spin, just to jump. In just one year, she started from two weeks to three weeks, and it took only three or four months to successfully master the three-week jump and continuous jump.
She was never satisfied, and after learning the three-week jump, she soon began to learn the three-and-a-half week jump that women's players rarely complete. Trusova's pursuit of difficulty is almost persistent, she said, I want to do things that no one has done before, and every time I want to do more.
These difficult rotational movements require extremely strong muscle strength, and they are also easy to strain, and falling down will be more painful. But Trusova didn't seem to care. On the contrary, when my parents expressed their heartache, she said, I am not a poor child, no one forced me to do this, on the contrary, the coaches always think that I jump too much. Like other kids, I rode my bike, watched movies, went to school, and everything was fine.
As a young and famous figure skater, Trusova soon grew up. Like all her peers, she began to develop, grow taller, and heavier, which made her no longer as light as when she was a child, needed to regain her balance when she landed, and could no longer jump up as easily as she had in the past.
In the history of figure skating, there are many athletes who are short-lived because of their age advantage. But in 2019, when Trusova competed for the first time in the adult category, she once again set a world record and completed three perfect four-week jumps. Legendary coach Tattiana Tarasova shouted excitedly on the TV show, it's just amazing! I support those who break through the ceiling with their heads and rush into outer space.
Trusova wrote in the self-introduction column of her ins account: "It is impossible to be possible." She rarely showed satisfaction with herself. In the race into outer space, Trusova's first four-week jump actually made a mistake. She did not succeed in landing, but fell. But her smile did not relent in the slightest, and she got up as if nothing had happened and continued to finish the following game, perfectly presenting the remaining three four-week jumps. Time and time again, she made the impossible possible.
After Trusova's technical difficulty had reached the ceiling of women's figure skating, she was still not satisfied. Figure skating is a sport of power and art. In many competitions, she has used the soundtrack from Game of Thrones as a performance track. Before her game, some people once questioned that it was difficult for the young Trussova to play the domineering spirit of the dragon mother. But in fact, when the Mother of Dragons first appeared, she was about the same age as Trusova. Trussova is not satisfied with the characteristics of not accepting defeat, and has a perfect care with the mother of dragons.
Trusova Image source Visual China
When young people get together
Whether it is Trusova or Gu Ailing, this quality of hard work and not accepting defeat seems to be engraved into their bones. In the Little Red Book, we also see a lot of people with similar traits. The huge energy that erupted from the dissatisfaction in the two of them is exactly the current situation of many people in the Little Red Book, and everyone wants to take a step forward and pursue a better life. Although the face of the unknown may produce fear, it will be afraid, but still firmly break the glass cover created by comfort.
Xiaohongshu user 50-year-old aunt self-driving tour, is a 50-year-old woman. After thirty years of marriage siege, she resolutely decided to live for herself once. She left the family, used her two years of savings to buy a white car, and headed in the opposite direction of home. In the two years she drove, she traveled through eight provinces, camped at the bus station, and met many new friends. She said she had never been as free and fulfilling and happy as she is now.
Little Red Book user 50-year-old aunt self-driving tour
Yueran Forest - Photographer decided to leave the factory where she had worked for nine years two years ago, and she could no longer bear to work to fill her life, but instead quit naked to become a freelance photographer. The decision required great courage, and it meant that she would give up her high salary and enter some kind of uncertain world. This made the people around her unable to understand, and there were constantly friends who calculated for her, saying that a month of naked resignation was equivalent to how much money she lost. But she longs for a concrete life, with specific emotions, specific relationships, and links with different people. In the two years as a photographer, YueRan regained her life and long-lost enthusiasm as she had hoped.
Little Red Book user Yueran Forest- Photographer
Coincidentally, there are many such people. They have young and enthusiastic souls, tired of the mediocre life of the moment. They are constantly breaking, rebuilding, and pursuing a better and broader life.
Dissatisfaction gives them the motivation to move forward, to turn over the waves of life. Everyone will be like these athletes, standing on the highest podium in the arena of their lives.