During the Beijing Winter Olympics, Qitaihe City in Heilongjiang Province became the focus of much attention.
More than 40 years ago, a coach named Meng Qingyu started skating here. After the efforts of several generations, this small city of less than 700,000 people has appeared Yang Yang, Wang Meng, Sun Linlin, Fan Kexin 4 Winter Olympic champions, 3 Special Olympics champions, 10 world champions, 16 times to break the world record, 7 Winter Olympic gold medals, 177 world-class gold medals, known as China's "Winter Olympic Champions Hometown".
Nowadays, walking on Qitaihe Street, casually ask a citizen, they have heard that Wang Meng is the daughter of a miner, Fan Kexin's home is a shoe repairer, and there is a YangYang Street not far from the city center... The completion of the "Short Track Speed Skating Championships Pavilion" in 2019 has made these athletes truly a landmark in their hometown.
The metamorphosis of a small city
Qitaihe City is located in the northeast border of China, at the western end of the Wandashan Mountains, with the Wuken River and the Tuoli River meandering through, and the temperature is below minus 20 ° C for 4 months a year, providing unique climatic and geographical conditions for various ice sports. "If you look at the Wuken River, you will know why the Qitai River has won the championship, and the river is full of skating." A netizen said so.
In the winter covered with ice and snow, children up to 45 years old, up to 60 or 70 years old, will go to the ice, snow, enjoy the happiness brought by ice and snow sports. The local people's love of ice and snow sports has become a habit and way of life.
Indeed, after 4 p.m. in mid-February, the temperature has dropped to -20 °C, but in the Taoshan Lake Ice and Snow Park in the north of the city, there are still many parents with their children playing snow slides, off-road vehicles pulling snow rings, snowmobiling, horse riding and other projects.
At the intersection of Shanhu Road and Yanhe Street next to Taoshan Lake Ice and Snow Park, the "Short Track Speed Skating Champion Hall" stands majestically. The museum was completed in 2011 and began construction as a city sightseeing tower. In order to prepare for the 2022 Winter Olympics and expand the advantages of the Qitaihe short-track speed skating project, the Qitaihe Municipal Party Committee and Municipal Government have built the sightseeing tower as a whole into a short-track speed skating champion hall, which will be completed and opened to the public in 2019. The whole tower has 8 floors, the second floor is a video display of Meng Qingyu and past coaches, and the third to fifth floors are Yang Yang, Wang Meng and Zhang Jie exhibition halls.
Before the birth of the Winter Olympic champion, Qitaihe was an industrial city born of coal and prospered from coal: in 1910, the Discovery of the Boli Coalfield, Qitaihe rose from the coal industry; after the founding of New China, the government began to mine the Qitaihe Coalfield in large quantities, bringing continuous vitality to this remote town; in 1983, Qitaihe was promoted to a provincial municipality, and was called the "Four Coal Cities of Heilongjiang" together with Jixi, Shuangyashan and Hegang.
According to the official website of the Qitaihe government, in recent years, Qitaihe has continued to promote the development of "six major industries" such as coal deep processing, new materials and new energy, biology and medicine, and advanced manufacturing, and accelerated the transformation and revitalization of the city.
With the continuous emergence of world champions, ice and snow tourism has also become one of the options for the transformation and development of Qitaihe.
A new Winter Olympic champion
After Wang Meng retired, Fan Kexin became a leading figure in the qitaihe short track speed skating movement.
On February 5, fan Kexin and Qu Chunyu, Wu Dajing, Ren Ziwei and Zhang Yuting lived up to expectations and won the gold medal in the mixed team relay final of the short track speed skating event held at the Capital Gymnasium; 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 race.
Before becoming famous, Fan Kexin's parents opened a shoe repair shop in qitaihe city. At the beginning of training, due to the poverty of his family, Fan Kexin could not even afford to buy a pair of 2500 yuan skates, and when he was a child, he also picked up waste on the side of the road. Today, Fan Kexin's parents have moved into the new "Champion Building" a few years ago.
According to Ms. Lu, a neighbor of Fan Kexin, "Fan Kexin's parents are older in the past two years and no longer repair their shoes, and they were picked up during the Beijing Winter Olympics." ”
On the evening of February 13, Fan Kexin and his teammates played the women's 3000m final in short track speed skating. After watching the game, Fan Keyin's brother Fan Enyu told reporters: "As a brother, I am very proud of her. ”
Fan Enyu said that when Fan Kexin trained before, he tried not to let his family watch it, because that scene looked too hard.
A founder of short track speed skating
The Qitaihe short-track speed skating project has achieved today's achievements, which are inseparable from Meng Qingyu. In his 33-year coaching career, he has produced dozens of Winter Olympic champions and world champions.
Ms. Han Pingyun, the widow of Meng Qingyu, introduced that Fan Kexin's family was not well off when she was a child, and she was malnourished from childhood, and Teacher Meng cared for her after the team. "At that time, many teachers said that her physical fitness was not good, and asked her to retire, but Teacher Meng insisted that she stay and improve her nutrition and conditioning her body."
Meng Qingyu was born in Harbin in 1951, and in 1969, he came to the qitaihe new mine as a coal miner with the intellectual youth "going to the mountains and going to the countryside". At that time, he used his spare time to practice skating, and also won the Hejiang regional skating championship on behalf of Qitaihe. Because Meng Qingyu is not good at words, he will only bury his head in hard work, and his co-workers have given him a nickname called "Mangzi". On August 2, 2006, Meng Qingyu and his team members drove from the Qitai River to Harbin, and unfortunately died in a car accident at the age of 56.
In 1974, Meng Qingyu was recruited to Qitaihe Sports School and became a skating coach. He pondered the skates and skates when he was fine, and also took the dressing mirrors sent by relatives and friends when he got married to correct the posture of the team members.
At that time, Meng Qingyu often led the team to the wild Wuken River to skate, sweeping the ice every night until eight or nine o'clock, and then getting up at one or two o'clock in the morning the next day to water it. At that time, Meng Qingyu welded a large iron bucket, hit a lot of eyes underneath, and put a large rag in the back, and after the water flowed down, the ice surface was relatively flat.
Sometimes Meng Qingyu came home in the early morning, and Han Pingyun saw that he was full of ice flowers and did not understand what was going on. Later, I learned that at -30 ° C in the northeast at night, the water in the iron bucket was frozen when it was poured, and it was stirred with a stick, and the splash of water on the body immediately froze.
Meng Qingyu later took the key class members to Harbin to practice skating, and the scheduled class time was often in the early morning or midnight, because the venue had to train the professional members of the provincial team during the day. At that time, Fan Kexin was one of them.
Han Pingyun remembers that one year during the New Year's holiday, the other teams left, which made Meng Qingyu happy, "because the whole ice rink was his, sliding from morning to night."
"I am still thinking about this year's Winter Olympics, if Teacher Meng is still there, it is not Fan Kexin, it should be a batch of champions born." Now Qitaihe directly trains short track speed skaters for the country, without going through the provincial team, which is really proud. Han Pingyun said.
A coach who trains champions
On February 16, 2002, Qitaihe athlete Yang Yang won the short track speed skating women's 500 meters championship at the Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, USA, achieving a "zero breakthrough" for the gold medal of Chinese athletes in the Winter Olympics.
Yang Yang's enlightenment coach, Dong Yanhai, has now returned to Qitaihe as the head coach of the short track speed skating school, and he and his wife Zhang Jie are both students of Meng Qingyu.
Dong Yanhai introduced that Yang Yang was the first batch of children he brought. "At that time (in the late 1970s), there were no indoor skating rinks, all of which were skating in the wild, and the Wuken River and the Taoshan Reservoir had been there. The wild is very cold, and the ice surface is uneven, Qitaihe athletes inherit the spirit of the miners who are not afraid of hardship and fatigue, and dare to fight against nature. He still remembers the scene when he was a child with Meng Qingyu pouring ice on the outdoor training ground. "Sometimes I go to school during the day, I have to get up at three o'clock in the morning, pull a big iron bucket to water, and when the water in the bucket freezes, I have to stir it with a rake, and the cold water splashes on the body and becomes an ice cube, and my hands and face have been frozen when I was a child."
Dong Yanhai's wife, Zhang Jie, is currently the head coach of the Short Track Speed Skating Training Center at Qitaihe Vocational College. Zhang Jie won the women's 1000m short track speed skating championship at the 1991 and 1993 World University Games and the women's 3000m relay championship at the 1993 World Championships, and was the first short track speed skating world champion in Qitaihe City.
Now, there are often young students from all over the world who come to the Qili River. Li Guofeng, a key class coach at the Qitaihe Amateur Short Track Speed Skating School, said that the children who come to skate, the family is poor, and the only cost when the students come is to buy an ice knife.
A set of sports and education integration model
Skating has become a part of the local culture of Qitaihe, and the continuous emergence of high-level athletes is not unrelated to the sports and education integration model implemented in Qitaihe City. In terms of talent training mode, Qitaihe City has established an echelon training mode of short track speed skating characteristic school, children's short track speed skating amateur sports school basic class - children's short track speed skating amateur sports school key class - Heilongjiang short track speed skating youth team, forming a training, transportation and selection mechanism from school to professional team, from amateur to vocational.
Since last year, through the creation of the "provincial team and city office" base, the Heilongjiang Short Track Speed Skating Youth Team has landed in Qitaihe, so that the short track speed skating training here has been upgraded from a prefectural and municipal semi-professional team to a provincial professional training team, and a channel has been opened to directly push outstanding athletes to the national team, and the door to the international arena has been opened.
According to statistics, Qitaihe City has more than 500 athletes in training, more than 20 coaches, in the speed skating, ski jumping, snowboarding and other six major projects, has sent more than 300 outstanding athletes to the state and provinces, in the national short track speed skating project registered athletes confirmed by more than 1300 people, is the national short track speed skating project reserve of the most abundant reserve talent reserve city.
"The physical education teaching of primary and secondary schools in the city lists ice and snow projects as compulsory courses, and strives to make a big chassis for the 'pyramid' of ice and snow talents." Lu Guodong, deputy director of the Qitaihe Municipal Education Bureau, said.
Since 2014, Qitaihe City has included skating in the middle school entrance examination, and skating accounts for 40 points out of the total score of 80 points in physical education. This has also made skating more important to teachers, students and parents, and more and more students are taking to the ice rink.
(Chengdu Business Daily)