Text | Zhao Wen
Edit | To the south
On the evening of February 13, Fan Kexin and his teammates Han Yutong, Qu Chunyu, Zhang Chutong and Zhang Yuting won the bronze medal in the short track speed skating women's 3000m relay competition. This is the Chinese short track speed skating women's team, which has reached the Olympic podium again in this event after a gap of 12 years.
After waving the national flag with his teammates to celebrate, Fan Kexin turned back to the center of the arena and knelt down to kiss the ice.
Since the Sochi Winter Olympics, Fan Kexin has experienced three Winter Olympics, and the 29-year-old has passed the peak of the athlete's peak, and her kiss on the ice does not mean that she will say goodbye to the ice rink and say goodbye to short track speed skating.
Fan Kexin said in an interview after the game that kissing the ice surface was because of gratitude, and she kissed the word "Beijing" below the ice surface, "Thank you for the motherland being so powerful to host the Winter Olympics." Thank you for allowing so many athletes to show themselves on the ice of their homeland. ”
"I've been in three Winter Olympics and I want it to be a legacy, I've been the second baton for 12 years and I hope someone can pick up the baton. I hope you have no regrets, I have felt how helpless I used to be. ”
At the time of the award, the cute Chinese team girls took to the podium and collectively made the iconic pose of "Superman", Fan Kexin said, "Every day we train hard, we are beyond the limit, each of us is a superman." ”
Fan Kexin said that she will continue the cause she loves, "Speed skating has a 50-year-old aunt (Claudia Peschstein of Germany), I am only 29 years old, as long as the national team needs me, I will always stand on the ice." 」 ”
Fan Kexin's love for speed skating stems from the starting point of her dream, Qitaihe City, Heilongjiang Province.
Qitaihe is a small city in a remote corner of China's map, with a population of less than 700,000. But it is such a city that has produced ten short track speed skating champions and 173 world-class gold medals, which is a veritable "hometown of China's short track speed skating".
The founder of this "city of champions" is Zhang Jie, Yang Yang, Wang Meng, Fan Kexin and other Coaches of Olympic champions - Meng Qingyu, who is also the prototype of the movie "Breaking the Ice".
Meng Qingyu was born in Harbin in 1951 to a working-class family. The family population is large, the income is very small, usually the children are blind playing, the long winter in the northeast makes Meng Qingyu more skating hobbies.
Meng Qingyu is very talented and has won the middle group championship in the city skating competition. He was also recommended to the Harbin Amateur Sports School. In 1966, the sports school was closed, and the last time he went to training, the coach secretly gave him a pair of hidden skates to encourage him to continue to pursue his dream of skating.
In 1969, at the age of 18, Meng Qingyu was assigned to the new coal mine in Qitaihe and became a miner. Not far from the mine, there is a wide Uken River, which becomes a natural ice rink in winter. No matter how tired he is from going down the well, whenever he has time to rest, he will go to slide a few laps.
With the improvement of technology, Meng Qingyu represented Qitaihe in the Hejiang Regional Ice Games and won the men's 1500 meters, 3000 meters and 5000 meters.
After the competition, the director of the Qitaihe City Sports Team found Meng Qingyu and invited him to work as a skating coach at the City Sports School. At that time, Meng Qingyu's mining bureau was obviously better paid, but for his skating dreams, he preferred to drop a few levels of salary and still chose to go to the sports school as a coach.
Qitaihe's short-track speed skating career began in the humble stadium of the sports school. At that time, there was no decent ice rink, and Meng Qingyu poured the ice rink himself.
Stills from the movie "Breaking the Ice"
Without an ice pouring machine, Meng Qingyu used a large iron bucket as a water tank, placed it on a climbing plow, and after filling it with water, he pulled a nearly one-ton ice pouring truck on the ice rink in a circle.
In the early morning of the northeast mid-winter, no matter how thick it is worn, it will be frozen into an iceman. When the ice rink is ready, he will call the children to get up and train, and when the training is over, he will go to school.
Despite the harsh conditions, Meng Qingyu persevered with enthusiasm and threw himself on the speed skating team. His love for speed skating is stronger than his love for his family's wife and children, and he devotes all his time and energy to the speed skating team members.
In order to have a minimum of living and training conditions, Meng Qingyu led the team members to repair houses, pan fires, build stoves, build pots and stoves, and even be called "bricklayer coaches".
Later, the Qitaihe team went to Harbin to "borrow ice for training", and more than 30 children were crammed into a 16-square-meter shantytown. Later, the house problem was solved, but the teams had to line up for ice, and in order to skate more, early morning training was commonplace.
An old player who experienced this at that time recalled: "The most guilty person is Coach Meng, he is a coach, a purchaser, a cook, and a father and wife of the team members." ”
The training team became another home for Meng Qingyu, who spent much longer here than with his wife and children. He used his own salary to subsidize the lives of the team members, the team members were sick because he spent money to buy medicine, the team members could not get enough nutrition, he paid for himself but changed the way to improve the lives of the team members.
In 1987, according to the trend of the development of ice and snow sports at home and abroad and the reality of Qitaihe, Meng Qingyu proposed to shift the speed skating team from the training of the main runway to the new project of short track speed skating according to local conditions.
On this basis, Meng Qingyu also proposed to focus on women's projects, which laid a good development prospect for Qitaihe ice sports, and also cultivated short-track speed skating stars such as Zhang Jie, Yang Yang, Wang Meng, Sun Linlin, fan Kexin.
For decades, Meng Qingyu and his team members have practiced together, suffered together, and rejoiced together. The team members walked stubble after stubble, and Meng Qingyu always insisted on his post. The players he personally brought out won a total of 471 gold medals in various levels and broke the world record 15 times
On August 2, 2006, on the way to Harbin for training, Meng Qingyu died in a car accident at the age of 55. He failed to witness the later moments of China's short track speed skating more brilliant.
Those team members who had been trained by Meng Qingyu were all sad, and they were sad that Enshi had put all his energy on them in this life, but before they could repay Shi's kindness with actions, he left.
When the car accident occurred, Meng Qingyu carried a pair of ice knives and a chronograph stopwatch in the things he carried. This is the epitome of his lifelong dedication to short track speed skating.
The success of athletes often comes from the careful cultivation of enlightenment coaches ten years ago. It is precisely because of understanding all this that Meng Qingyu will use his life's energy to plant seeds on the wild ice rink of Qitaihe, cultivate an excellent athlete, and support every child who is eager for a championship to go to the ice rink.
That year, after the dissolution of the sports school, Meng Qingyu's coach secretly gave him a pair of hidden skates to encourage him to continue practicing. When Meng Qingyu saw that Fan Kexin could not afford to buy skates because of her family's poverty, she bought a pair of skates out of her own pocket to encourage her to keep working hard.
In a way, this is also a generation of coaches and athletes. The baton of inheritance will be passed on from generation to generation.
After Meng Qingyu's death, a group of outstanding coaches and athletes selected and trained by him personally took over his stopwatch, and like him, became the cornerstone of the future of short track speed skating with his shoulders.
There are glory in the past, and there are people who follow it, I believe that in the near future, we will witness the most vigorous and vigorous golden age of China's short track speed skating projects.