Sui Wenjing/Han Cong won the gold medal in figure skating pair skating at the Beijing Winter Olympics with a perfect set of "Golden Bridge on the River of Sorrows", which is also the second gold medal in figure skating pair skating after Shen Xue/Zhao Hongbo won the Vancouver Winter Olympics. Chinese figure skating can achieve today's results, and it is inseparable from one person, that is, Yao Bin.
At the 1980 World Figure Skating Championships in Dortmund, Germany, Yao Bin and Luan Bo teamed up in pair skating, and the results were at the bottom. Four years later, at the Winter Olympics in Sarajevo, Yao Bin/Luan Bo is still the last place. Such results are actually not unexpected, after all, Chinese figure skating at that time was not even the most basic common sense of the competition.
At the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver, Shen Xue/Zhao Hongbo won a historic Olympic gold medal in pairs skating, breaking Russia's record of never losing a gold medal in 46 years. In the past 30 years, China's pair skating has gone from the bottom of the World Series to the highest honor of the Olympic Games, and Yao Bin is a witness and a founder.
China's first generation of figure skaters
Yao Bin was born in Harbin in 1957, and the primary school he attended was a famous athletics school, and there were often sports school coaches who came to the school to select materials. However, the yin and yang is that when Yao Bin was in the first grade, the district sports school coach came to select materials for figure skating, and he was suddenly selected, began figure skating training, and became the first generation of figure skaters in China.
In 1980, Yao Bin, who was injured, was preparing to change careers, and the leader stopped him, "At that time, he said that my body, image and other aspects were not bad, and he was ready to let me practice double skating." In this way, Yao Bin became China's first generation of pair skaters. Taking Yao Bin to practice pair skating is the previous single skating coach, so everyone has black eyes and does not know where to start from the pair skating training. "At that time, everyone didn't understand, there was no information, and there were very few videos." However, Yao Bin's personality is either not to do it, or to do it well, so he is determined to do things well.
Yao Bin is good at learning and researching, and when others have finished training and playing chess, he uses them to read books. "I especially like to read philosophy books that expand my thinking and allow me to think beyond the problem itself and look at it from a higher perspective when I encounter a lot of problems."
After entering the national team, Yao Bin and Luan Bo formed a pair skating combination. After practicing together for 4 months, Yao Bin/Luan Bo went to participate in the 1980 World Figure Skating Championships in Dortmund, Germany. At that time, many sports in China were not only difficult to match the international high level in terms of sports level, but even some of the most basic competition knowledge was not very clear, and the results were naturally imaginable. Yao Bin recalled, "At that time, the level of figure skating in our country was simply incomparable with that of European and American athletes. We go abroad to compete and see the training of European and American players, just like looking at God. Their female players can easily jump for three weeks, and we male players can't do it. After participating in the Winter Olympics in Sarajevo and finishing at the bottom of the results, Yao Bin retired and ended this special sports career.
Holding an English dictionary in hand, groping for training methods
In 1986, Yao Bin returned to the national team and became the coach of the national team. At that time, there was no teaching material in China on how figure skating should be trained, and Yao Bin could only grope a little.
In the beginning, Chinese figure skating completely separated winter and summer training. In the summer, there is no venue, so I practice physical fitness. Practicing endurance is long-distance running; if you need speed, you practice sprinting; when you practice strength, you lift a barbell; flexibility, you press your legs.
His own experience as an athlete made Yao Bin very clear that this training method did not work at all, and it was useless to practice on the ice in the summer. Therefore, Yao Bin completely overturned this training method, starting from the movement characteristics of figure skating, taking ice movement as the basic element of training, and splitting the action onto land and ice. In this way, even in the season when there is no ice rink, the content of training is related to figure skating.
In order to form his own set of effective training methods, Yao Bin trekked to the Border between China and the Soviet Union in the Heihe River, looking for black-and-white TELEVISION to watch the live broadcast of the World Championships; holding an English dictionary in his hand, translating the magazine "Ice and Snow Sports" word by word. "We don't have textbooks, only a book of international figure skating rules. At that time, relying on an English dictionary, looking up word by word, flipping through many international magazines in figure skating, learning from foreign teaching experience. Yao Bin also learned from an English rookie to fluent standard English. In this way, Yao Bin improved the training method little by little, step by step, and boldly innovated twisting, throwing and jumping, which has also become the housekeeping skill of Chinese players.
In order to do their best, Yao Bin and his disciples also suffered a lot. "The conditions were very tough at that time, and the costumes, the music, the choreography were all made by ourselves." Yao Bin recalled that there was no artificial ice at that time, and Shen Xue/Zhao Hongbo trained at two o'clock in the morning when they rowed "Yellow River", because there was no one to pour ice, and the quality of the ice surface was difficult to guarantee. Sometimes, the water dripping from the roof formed an ice lump, which became a hidden danger for training, and Zhao Hongbo's foot was injured several times.
Shen Xue/Zhao Hongbo, Pang Qing/Tong Jian and Zhang Dan/Zhang Hao are all duo skating combinations cultivated by Yao Bin. At the 2006 Winter Olympics in Turin, the three pairs of skating were second, third and fourth, and the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics were the first, second and fifth places, and Shen Xue/Zhao Hongbo won the first Winter Olympic gold medal in the history of Chinese figure skating.
In June 2017, Yao Bin stepped down as the head coach of the Chinese figure skating team and was taken over by his disciple Zhao Hongbo. In 2021, Yao Bin was invited by the Winter Sports Management Center of the State General Administration of Sport to coach the men's singles, women's singles and ice dance groups of figure skating. As the godfather of Chinese figure skating, Yao Bin has trained a large number of outstanding pair skaters and single skaters who have won domestic and foreign championships at all levels, and has embarked on an unprecedented "ice-breaking" road, which is also the "ice-breaking" road of Chinese figure skating.