The one-year postponement of the Tokyo Olympics officially opened on July 23. The Chinese team delegation has a total of 777 people, including 431 athletes, who went to Tokyo to compete and shine on the field.
They shed sweat and blood, leaving behind a fighting figure. The experience on the stadium allows every athlete to experience success and failure, and then learn to be tenacious and never give up.
And when the race is over, life goes on. There is a force that inspires them to move forward.
We looked at three top athletes, some of whom were world champions or some of whom were top players with full potential. Although they are not on the field at this moment, they dare to push back and start over again than they cross the peak.
In the next game of life, what they want to tell is a new story.
Wen | also rejoiced
Editor| Li Li
Figure | Courtesy of respondents (unless noted)
Go higher
Linlin Deng is a female gymnast and Olympic champion
In the summer of 2021, 29-year-old Deng Linlin graduated again.
After receiving her bachelor's degree from Peking University, she now holds a master's degree in physical education from Beijing Sport University and California Baptist University. As the only female gymnast in China to have won two Olympic championships so far, zhang Xia, a former coach, commented that she has a particularly simple and pure training idea.
This brought her to the end and to the heights.
Deng Linlin began practicing gymnastics at the age of 6, and training was the whole of her life. Eating, sleeping, training, no need to think about anything, the ups and downs of the mood are accompanied by the results of training, and she almost blocks out all things that have nothing to do with training, especially closed. In a 2016 interview with People, she talked about her previous life, and there was only training in my world. She doesn't remember if her parents showed up at a crucial point, and her memory often goes blank, remembering only the details related to the game, only the words of the coach.
Born in rural Fuyang, Anhui Province, she was selected for the national team at the age of 12. At that time, she was a short girl, didn't talk much, and her nose was always a little red. Her talent is not outstanding, as soon as she arrived at the national team, this girl heard someone tell her that you can't practice like this. For the first time, Deng Linlin felt that she didn't want to practice. But my mother said that after entering the national team, it was impossible to go back. Back on the training ground, Deng Linlin held her breath in her heart, maybe she had been snubbed since she was a child... Including that sentence must have been hurt from the heart. She knows that her conditions and talents are not the most remarkable, but she is a strong girl, although she is only 11 years old, she knows that only achievements can prove her worth. She obeyed a very strong conviction and simply walked down one path to the top podium of the Olympic Games, twice.
At the Beijing Olympic Games, Deng Linlin won the women's gymnastics team championship
In 2013, she chose to retire. After retiring from the army, Deng Linlin's fate was almost perfect, and she was escorted to the School of International Relations of Peking University, but this also meant that she was thrown from a closed and simple world into reality.
Life is much more complicated than the simpler, pure arena. "People" records Deng Linlin's confusion when she first entered the university: she did not know how to choose a course, and she could not find a classroom in class. The first time she went to the library, she watched her classmates borrow books in the glass window, but she didn't know how to get in. On the first day of enrollment, she went to take a bath, and she found that she even needed a bath card in college, where should the bath card go? In the final exam of freshman year, the students around her could write about ringing the bell, and she wrote on the paper for a while and did not know what to write.
It was a very confusing time. Outside of gymnastics, there's nothing you like and can put in. After graduating from undergraduate, as the top former athlete, she had many choices and many temptations. But Deng Linlin was still a little wobbly, not knowing what she wanted to do in the future.
An inner exploration and torture may begin at this time. When she was studying at Peking University, Deng Linlin's favorite was the open-ended and guided courses. In a class called critical thinking, the teacher said that we should understand things in a questioning manner, tap into our desire to learn, read, investigate, and express our opinions. Although it has been several years since this class, Deng Linlin still remembers the words of the teacher in the class.
Unlike the absolute obedience to orders in a sports career, Deng Linlin realized that there are many paths in life, and many times there is no standard and specific answer.
But one thing was clear, she wanted to see the wider world outside. After that, she went to graduate school at Beijing Sport University and went to the United States to study for another year. Learning was tough, but that purity and simplicity helped her again. This summer, she successfully graduated, and in the second stage of her life, she once again won the victory record.
For her own life, Deng Linlin said that her thinking will be clearer now.
She chose to get back into sports. At the 14th Youth Gymnastics National Games just past, Deng Linlin served as the referee. Now that she is also the chairman of the Anhui Provincial Sports Development Foundation, she is about to return to the Anhui Provincial Sports Bureau to take up a position, and she wants to do more in sports public welfare.
Compared to stepping in in a vacuum as a child, this time, it was she who chose her own arena.
A rebirth
Gong Weijie, former world badminton champion
The accident happened in one morning. It was 2009, the day before the China Open Badminton Championships, the last intra-team training before the national team went out. Badminton player Gong Weijie and his teammates practiced 3-on-3, in order to save a net front ball, Gong Weijie accidentally lost his foot. What I didn't expect was that this small accident made the life built in the past collapse.
From the age of five and a half, every morning at 5:30, Gong Weijie would sit in the back seat of his parents' bicycle to go to the sports school, which connected his life's fate with the badminton ball that always flew in the air. The training was boring and hard, a swing action practiced for two years, every day the left and right legs had to be split, the legs were opened to enter the frame, the chest had to touch the ground, the coach pressed on the body, and every day I cried. But when it comes to playing games, Gong Weijie can always win. The first love came from playing well.
At the age of 11, Gong Weijie, a hubei native, went to Xiamen alone with a bag and became a professional badminton player. At the age of 18, Gong Weijie won the first place in the national championship team and entered the national badminton first team. Two years later, in 2004, he defeated world number two Denmark's Gade in the quarter-finals of the China Open. Although he had never been to the Olympic stadium, at the time, he was a rising star, and coach Tang Xianhu said that Gong Weijie was the future hope of the Chinese team.
After the injury, the team doctor took Gong Weijie to major hospitals, but Gong Weijie always had a pain point in his ankle and could not find the cause. At the next National Games, he took a needle every day and took three injections on the pain points in his ankle. Still useless, I finally pushed two more stitches of anesthetic. After the game, he went to surgery again. From a medical point of view, a cyst was formed inside the ankle, and he did minimal trauma, precipitated the cyst, and then did rehabilitation, but the pain point was always there. Occupying the badminton arena of all his past life, he could only be reluctantly forced to end. Gong Weijie was 26 years old that year, and he felt that it was a death.
He was reluctant to sign the retirement report. But a year has passed, two years have passed, and it still hurts, and I still can't play. During those days, I didn't know what I could do, and I was full of doubts and denials about myself. The strength of past life comes from daily training and love for badminton, so what about when you walk out of the arena? Negativity is my best expression of life.
In the third year of the injury, Gong Weijie signed a retirement report. But he still felt like he was out of his own life. Until a friend tells him you have to find out where your roots are. That is badminton, of course, Gong Weijie began to think, if you can't compete in a competitive way, can you still meet in another way?
In the past, in the badminton field, Gong Weijie played offense, fighting speed, and smashing. His temper is direct and he just wants to win. Today, he has changed from spear to shield, become a promoter of badminton, established a badminton club, and also began to be a commentator on CCTV.
Turning what he loves into a career, he doesn't want to ignore any small thing. From the beginning of the club, he carefully selected the club's coaches and often appeared on the training ground himself. Patrol the field, identify teaching problems at a glance, record, and then meet and discuss. Those past training on the field were not in vain, and if you played so well, then you must have understood it well enough. And when you understand it well enough, you may be able to explain it most clearly.
His requirements are very strict, such as on the training ground, not a word of rudeness can be said, otherwise there will be a penalty of 50 push-ups. Not only to practice badminton skills, but also to learn to respect and care for people.
In these small and important things, he regained a sense of meaning. He described it as a rebirth.
The world is big, the world is small
Sun Wei is a male sabre-bearer of the Chinese Fencing Team
In 2009, fencer Sun Wei also experienced an accident on the training ground. It was an ordinary training in preparation for the National Games, Sun Wei and his teammates competed to turn back, he was 0.01 seconds slower, the moment he stopped he did not accept defeat, shouted, but the heart seemed to be hit, the heart beat, every time he jumped, it struck a pain.
When he arrived at the hospital, Sun Wei was diagnosed that the protective membrane of the lung was broken. Sun Wei remembers that the lights on the operating table were particularly dazzling. When he woke up, he was in the intensive care unit, two particularly thick tubes inserted into his left armpit, and the anesthesia hurt as soon as it passed. The bed was very small, and his feet, which were 1 meter 93 tall, were exposed, unable to move, and felt sealed.
At that time, it was Sun Wei's golden period as an athlete. 17 years old, young and energetic, has seen high-quality confrontation in the national team, slowly has a recognition of fencing, he has just formed his own style of play, and he has also been effective in domestic competitions. The whole person thought, four years later, there is a play in London. In his hospital bed, the doctor told him that you would never be able to engage in competitive sports anymore. At the highest point of his life, he was dragged, pulled down, and fell to the ground.
That year's National Games, he was lying in bed watching. When he got home from the hospital, he had to get out of bed, had to support the wall when he went to the toilet, and when he woke up, he either ate or slept, and he was depressed all day. In the TV, teammates are playing. He thought, if I was playing, how nice it would be.
Kendo is where I belong. He got up from the bed, started to learn to walk, recovered little by little, and forced himself to eat. Six months later, he kept up with his teammates' amount of exercise. A year later, he went to play a game, but with a palpitation in his heart after the injury, he did not dare to shout and did not dare to let go of the fight, so no one could fight. He had to become focused again. Putting aside his distractions, he focused on every joint, every breath, and the feeling of his fingers holding the sword. In 2013, Sun Wei returned to the national team. In 2016, he became the only Chinese athlete to win a place in the men's sabre at the Rio Olympics.
After returning home from Rio, more people saw him. With curiosity about the larger world, in addition to training, he also tried to record variety shows, shoot TV series, appear in fashion magazines, and participate in many cross-border activities.
Sun Wei off the field
But as long as he is preparing for the game, he will always return to the world where there is only fencing. Every Monday to Saturday, there is a fixed time to eat and train. This is the life that Sun Wei has lived since he entered the Jiangsu Provincial Fencing Team at the age of 13, an order that has been prescribed for a good time, repetitive but pure. This time, his goal is clear – to be the champion of the 2021 National Games.
Sun Wei began to learn kendo at the age of 10, from the city team to the provincial team to the national team, fencing has accompanied him for most of his life. When there is no game to play, he also always pays attention to the situation of fencing at home and abroad, and his hands are itchy and his heart is also quite itchy. For him, fencing is like an old friend who has known him for many years and can't give up. Chopsticks, water cups and bottles, any one of which reaches Sun Wei's hand, he will be like picking up a sword and making a few strokes.
What attracted Sun Wei the most was the desire to fight when he picked up a sword. From the beginning of not being able to fight, to slowly being able to beat others, Sun Wei had self-confidence and found that he could and could go to a high place. No matter where he was, he was always targeting the best players in the world, putting them on his own field, thinking about how to deal with them if they were the opposite.
In my bones, I feel that I am a particularly strong person, a person who especially wants, otherwise I don't think I would be able to get to where I am today. Because I know I can go higher, I always believe that I can. Sun Wei said. Having seen the bigger world, I am more committed to my dreams. During these days, he trained hard day after day and continued to storm the highest podium that belonged to him.
Sun Wei in the competition image source Visual China
Nowadays, Sun Wei often feels that there is not enough time, and he knows very well that he is facing a state of less and less practice. This time, Sun Wei is facing a new injury — a subtle, uncontrollable pain in the Achilles tendon. It may be related to age, and at a younger age, no matter how tired Sun Wei is from practicing, he will be relieved when he wakes up the next day. Now that Sun Wei is 29 years old, the National Games two months later may be the last big game of his sports career. In the face of pain that cannot be eliminated, you can only perceive it and reconcile with it.
And when each day's training began, he warmed up, ran and jumped, and once again, without hesitation, walked into the arena.
Deng Linlin, Gong Weijie and Sun Wei were all top athletes who were concerned by the whole people. With their respective life encounters, they all left the once familiar arena. Deng Linlin chose to use that simplicity and purity to face the more complex real world; Gong Weijie used love and persistence to learn to get along with failure; and Sun Wei returned to his beloved kendo itself after seeing the larger world. The spirit of athletes is to be strong, not to give up, in the ups and downs of life, they become strong again and again, just because they all live in a hero.
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Video source: Mengniu
As a newcomer to the workplace who has just graduated, Deng Linlin's hero is Li Ning, who not only has excellent results in the sports field, but also become an excellent entrepreneur after transformation. Continuing to ascend on the path of life is exactly what she aspires to achieve.
Sun Wei, who returned to the arena, the hero in his heart is the 2004 Athens Olympic kendo champion Montano, the 40-year-old Italian star has the ultimate pursuit of kendo and is still active in the arena today. Just like Sun Wei, who was preparing for battle, he was still eager to improve his kendo.
In Gong Weijie's view, the hero is invisible. After experiencing peaks and valleys, he has long learned to rebuild the arena of life with his inner strength.
Always dare to tear down and start over, this is the belief given to them by the heroes in their hearts. So, who is your hero? In the never-ending arena of life, what inspires you to move forward?