Wen | Zhuang Jiaren
Edit | Lu Leng
Produced by | Tencent News Lichun Studio
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Wang Meng, 38 years old, retired for eight years, and participated in the last Olympic Games in 2010. She stepped down as the head coach of the National Short Track Speed Skating Team two years ago. She can't speak fluent English, her background can't provide talking points, and she doesn't have the kind of appearance that can be transformed into an idol. She stood outside the 2022 Winter Olympics and became the brightest star of the Beijing Winter Olympics with athletes such as Gu Ailing and Yusheng Jiexian.
Some people call her the "auspicious three treasures" of the Beijing Winter Olympics, and the earliest golden phrase "My eyes are rulers" that came out of the circle was shouted out by her in the live broadcast room. Her style of commentary is so distinct, roaring, shooting, outspoken, passionately pointing, and also making accurate and detailed explanations at the moments when the most professional judgment is needed.
Every Olympic Games gives birth to its own stars. Every star can create their own era. It is rare for a retired athlete to rely on his personal charm to gain such widespread affection from the audience. The legend of Gu Ailing and Yu Sheng is at the right time, and nearly a decade has passed since the "Mao Era", but this does not prevent this athlete from maintaining a happy, even "full of stubbornness", and maintaining an emotional resonance with the audience.
Wang Meng's first commentary on February 5 attracted attention. "Tokuunsha is a fugitive cross-talk actor", this is the first impression of the former top athlete. Subsequently, as the competition became more and more fierce, the emotional and professional value she provided became more and more than funny.
On the night of the men's 5,000m relay semi-finals of the short track speed skating, she "blamed" the audience: "Don't always think about watching the final, what if you are eliminated in the preliminaries?" After preparing for the Olympic Games for so long, you don't even look at people. This is probably the most used "condemned" by netizens.
The woman's speed skating showed a decline, and she was very angry: "What! It's a stomp to go up! Whoever he is! The Chinese team members accidentally fell in the relay match, and people's surprise quickly turned into frustration, and Wang Meng wrapped his hands around his chest and cheered everyone up with his personal experience: "Don't worry, there will be a penalty for kicking the knife." The referee now finds out the rules and takes a good look. When the official penalty result was really announced, Wang Meng was excited to hammer the table: "What do I say!" She snapped at the tabletop: "I just asked, is my coach in vain!" Like the previous times, Huang Jianxiang next to him could only sigh rather "weakly": "With your words, everyone will be solid." ”
Traditional Chinese sports event commentary advocates emotional stability, conciseness and proper commentary. Huang Jianxiang was originally an outlier, but this time he met Wang Meng, who was "wild road", he was also lined with "unremarkable". She can nag, dare to say, in the live broadcast room, as soon as she is excited, she will leave the table and shout in spite of it: "Stop, aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa "So fragile?" Blowing wind and falling? She opened the "connotation skill" to the South Korean team, and also humorously ridiculed the "Turkish big brother" repeatedly rushed to run. Sometimes she is like Yan Shi: "Kick nine circles yourself, the whole glue is useless", and sometimes she is like an "old mother": "Da Jing'er, slip up, leave the glue to others." ”
Ordinary people may not be able to understand everything she says, but those large body movements and high-rise voice tones are to make the audience feel happy, happy, and kind.
Although it is related to her vivid and joyful sense of northeast dialect, it is also because she is straightforward and rarely takes care of it. She was not good at memorizing the script, and when she read those affectionate, grand sentences, every word was stiff and awkward. Nagging is her best play. Between matches, she recalled how she used profanity to choke on the Korean team off the field; generously took off the team uniform to give it to German athletes, and hated the ugly sportswear of the other side; she complained that there was only McDonald's in the Olympic village of a certain country, and Durex saw it everywhere, and speculated with a serious face: so-and-so "went back to the box full of it"... It's all a different side of the athlete that you don't have a chance to hear.
She looked sloppy, but not sloppy. Various variety shows can see her high degree of cooperation - whether it is dressed as Naruto in Jiangsu Satellite TV, or in Heilongjiang Tai wearing a shoddy dragon robe. Even today, she doesn't want to recall the shadows of her career over and over again, and she will laugh and explain to reporters, not that I don't want to say, I just don't want to rely on these to win everyone's sympathy and attention.
Wang Meng participated in the Jiangsu Satellite TV variety show "Extraordinary Partner"
She is confident enough, of course, from the top technical strength, to fully accept herself, such as she will correct others - my figure is not fat, but "strong".
Nowadays, there are also new styles of sports stars, such as Haidian model Gu Ailing. Wang Meng is obviously not a sports champion cultivated under the elite system. She has no Chinese and Western education background, nor is she like Yu Sheng, "taking the mission as fate".
Her successful experience and sports career are all Chinese local. Like many athletes in the past, they come from remote towns, are found and selected by sports schools, and exercise their will in hard group life and training. They carved "glory for the country" in their blood, and in a limited professional life, they overcame their wounds, created peaks or failures, and finally fell silent.
Wang Meng also walked such a trajectory. Her hometown is Qitaihe City, Heilongjiang Province. This prefecture-level city with a permanent population of more than 600,000 is far from the tip of the mouth of the "big rooster", and its specialty is only coal before the attention of the Olympic ice and snow project is swept away. Many years later, the media followed Wang Meng back to her hometown, and she recalled briskly: her parents were unfamiliar with professional sports at first, and it was the enlightenment coach who carried a drink to the door before taking her to the sports school. When she was a child, she skated and fell all over her face with blood, rubbing her sleeve and practicing, the blood froze, and she thought it was a snot. When she slept in the gymnasium dormitory, she had to measure the precise distance with both hands so that she did not fall from the top bunk.
Usually her coaches talk about this apprentice without smiling. For example, Li Yan, who was the head coach of the Chinese short track speed skating team, believes that if Wang Meng plays women's football, he can also enter the national team. She has the intelligence characteristic of top athletes, and every muscle carries the intuition of movement. She is the most instrumental athlete in the Chinese short track speed skating team, usually other team members sharpen their knives for about ten minutes a day, and Wang Meng spends an hour alone with her ice knives: grinding, calibrating, and pondering data. Once a team member also wanted to "whole equipment", could not do anything, asked her "how to tidy up the equipment, no wonder you skated so fast." She loves speed skating and strives to understand. Inside the arena, she had to figure out the rules of the game, without a translator, and also to grab the technical representatives of the International Skating Federation, watch the video frame by frame, and ask for advice for two hours. Off the field, she wanted to understand why the Dutch were so good at skating, so she went along the rivers in the country to "conduct research".
The genius of China's short track speed skating world peaked in 2006-2010. In those years, Wang Meng went out to compete, and the medals and gold medals he got back were sometimes bagged. But she's by no means a gold medal machine. In addition to skating, Wang Meng likes football, table tennis, badminton, billiards and all other ball sports, and can also race cars, run marathons, and play e-sports. In her early years at the team's fraternity, she imitated Lausanne to impress her teammates. She sang well, and the crosstalk was so good that it was impressive—later, she simply put her own crosstalk in her headphones.
Of course, she had a thorny part of her body. Especially in the world of sports, which is full of strict regulations and burdened with heavy tasks, her personal will sometimes collides with the environment. Her reaction can be summed up as – then I'll go. She is probably one of the very few players who says to the camera, "I want to go back to the local team to train, because the national team training is not suitable for me." However, the story begins with a wayward beginning and ends with a very temperamental one - after a victory, Wang Meng slid to the side of the field and prostrated his head at the head coach, and the master and apprentice iced the previous suspicions.
At the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics, Wang Meng won the women's short track speed skating 500 meters championship and hugged his mentor Li Yan
Later, Wang Meng retired, and her later stories gradually became less and less concerned. If it were not for the unexpected popularity of this commentary, people may not know at all that after the end of his career, Wang Meng is also continuing to explore a not so logical path for the remaining decades of his life.
After the rise of short videos, she founded an MCN company and decided to find a way for retired athletes: "Let society re-accept him." Why do [athletes] have to bring goods with them when they want to live stream? How else would he live? He also needs to live, he needs to produce value. "This company does not have social recruitment or school recruitment, only for retired athletes. Some people are suitable for the front of the stage, they will be trained to be anchors; some people are suitable for the background, then learn to do camera, do central control.
Wang Meng said in an interview with Tencent News's "Financial Appointment You" program that it is his mission to solve the problem of reemployment for retired athletes
In 2016, Wang Meng began recording variety reality shows at high frequency. She crossed the border diligently and completed every game conscientiously, but still not in the head sequence - no matter the popularity, commercial value, topic degree, she is not the first choice for variety shows. At the 2018 PyeongChang Winter Olympics, she also gave many media interviews and commented on the event, with a humorous style and sharp speech, and still had a mediocre response. Four years later, the Winter Olympics came to Beijing, and she also appeared in the online live broadcast room again, with the opportunity to be seen by a younger, more open, and more accepting audience, and finally detonated the entire Internet.
Wang Meng has always been the Same Wang Meng, but the audience has long been no longer the audience of the past.
Like all great athletes, Wang Meng also has to cross some of the lows in his career and eventually return to ordinary life. Fans occasionally struggle to hope that she can pass the torch in the infield of the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games. However, Wang Meng looked satisfied and happy, and she beautifully described her appearance during the Torch Relay in the Winter Olympic Park: "A small hand on the back, the sword points to the future."
Wang Meng demonstrated "backhand skating" to everyone while passing the torch
She is still willing to carry some huge mission, but this does not prevent her from releasing happiness at this moment, or for a long time. Fortunately, this happiness is now completely felt by the audience.
(Source: Tencent News)
* Some images are from the internet