Freezing Point Feature No. 1253
Changed careers for the Winter Olympics
Wang Ziyan took a group photo with her teammates in the cross-border cross-discipline training team. Courtesy of respondents
The Winter Sports Management Center of Zheng university sports institute conducts cross-border cross-sports selection in Tagou Wushu School. Courtesy of respondents
Wang Xiaobing and Su Yiming took a group photo during the training camp in Japan. Courtesy of respondents
Du Xiaojiao participated in the steel frame bobsleigh competition in Park City, USA, in the North American Cup. Courtesy of respondents
Wang Xiaobing (second from left) and Su Yiming (first from right) pose for a group photo during a training camp in Japan. Courtesy of respondents
For a group of students living at the Henan Martial Arts School, the Olympics are far away and seem close.
These martial arts students, who have never been exposed to ice and snow sports, line up in a long line, with number plates on their bodies, flip over in front of unfamiliar foreign coaches, flip over their hands sideways, and then pass physical fitness tests and special tests.
In 2018, in order to prepare for the Beijing Winter Olympics, the State General Administration of Sport selected a group of seedlings nationwide to enter the cross-border cross-border national training team, trying to excavate and cultivate athletes with ice and snow sports talents and make up for many gaps in China's ice and snow sports.
In the end, the real appearance on the list of Winter Olympic players is a very small number. Taking Henan Province as an example, 3,000 people were selected from 80,000 people in the cross-border cross-sports selection, 300 people were sent to the national training team, and only 2 people finally entered the Beijing Winter Olympic Games.
Cross-border
Wang Xiaobing, who was sent by his family to puyang acrobatic art school to learn trampoline at the age of 12, was fascinated by the feeling of stopping in the air: jumping up with his feet, taking off his body, two flips, tightening his muscles and maintaining the state of "flying".
Even though that's only 1.5 seconds.
It will take several years to complete this 1.5 seconds. Lying on the trampoline, he bounced up with the force of his back, and the soles of his feet went high along the vertical wall, using the power of the bounce to complete the action of going up the wall. Optics this performance on the wall, he has to practice for 3 years.
He hadn't planned how far or how high he would jump in the future, and most of the graduates of acrobatic schools would work as acrobatic teachers or do small business related to acrobatics. His classmates said that acrobats have to stay up for several years to practice a move, master more than a dozen acrobatic programs in a lifetime, and the best way out is to enter the world's top circus.
Obsessed with the feeling of flying is also a must for snowboarders. In 2018, a new way out is in front of Wang Xiaobing: acrobats have good physical fitness, a skillful movement foundation, strong physical control, and the quality of ice and snow athletes. At that time, Puyang Acrobatic Art School selected 100 students to participate in the project, and Wang Xiaobing was one of them.
His reasons for being willing to participate are childish — fun, experience a handful of skiing, and don't have to spend the family's money, "Big deal, get out!" ”
Wang Xiaobing's father is a truck driver and his mother is a housewife, and the family has never skied snow. After passing the selection, he simply informed his parents and followed the big team to Beijing to learn skiing.
Liu Zhiwei, director of the Winter Sports Management Center of the School of Physical Education of Zhengzhou University, introduced that although Henan Province does not have the venues, team members and coaches to develop ice and snow sports, there are rich cross-border cross-disciplinary talent resources, and the 80,000 martial arts students in Dengfeng are the focus of material selection.
Wang Ziyan, a student at the Shaolin Tagou Martial Arts School, recalled that the life of the martial arts school was boring and single, and students could not use mobile phones, go home once a year, eat and return to the dormitory, and let the students squat during meetings so that the coach could see everyone. The only entertainment was in the training room with equipment and mats as cover, play hide-and-seek and eagle catch chicks. In the summer, everyone was lying in bed chatting, louder than anyone else, and loud laughter flew out of the creaky old wooden door and echoed in the dark dormitory corridor.
The first time she got on snowboarding, Wang Ziyan's legs trembled and rushed straight down, because she could not brake, and fell out on her knees.
But she fell in love with the feeling of fighting against the wind resistance. She didn't like to be restrained since she was a child, and when she saw someone else's unpaired house, she flipped into the window with her hand, roasted sweet potatoes in it, and blackened the walls.
Four years ago, when the ski teacher came to select people, Wang Ziyan was practicing wheel arm slapping on the cushion of the training room, and she needed to quickly lift her arms to draw circles in the air. People who have been practicing martial arts for many years will have shoulder joints like lubricating oil, drawing a complete and smooth circle.
This is one of the routine movements, which is a combination of martial arts movements. Take off and jump steadily, land lightly, and sometimes practice on the cement floor outdoors to strengthen body control.
After entering the training team, the physical inertia cultivated by the martial arts made Wang Ziyan more lightweight and fluent when completing the technical movements on the snow. As she turns, she changes her center of gravity, exerts force on her legs, carefully shifts the front and rear blades of the skateboard, while slowly squatting down at the right point in time, leaving a beautiful "S-shaped" arc on the snow, and she feels "stuck".
Cross-item
Those who received the invitation to select materials also included athletes from athletics, rowing, basketball and other sports in various provinces.
Du Xiaojiao has a pair of hands that are the size of adult males. When the coach went to primary school to select materials, he met her with a pair of chubby hands, which indicated that she would be taller and suitable for rowing. She did grow to 1.83 meters tall, with wide shoulders and long arms, and a well-proportioned figure, which is an innate advantage for a rower to paddle further.
She entered the Liaoning Provincial Rowing Team at the age of 16, is the younger member of the team, according to the normal upward trend of athletes, Du Xiaojiao's next goal is to enter the rowing national team.
Fate took a detour when she was 20 years old. It was when she was just about to make grades and was emerging. The coach suddenly took her out of the house, "took you to have fun", and then sent her to the selection site of the steel frame snowmobile crossover.
At the time, it was a little-known ice and snow sport. She searched the Internet temporarily, and the most impressive introduction was that a foreign woman was lying on her stomach on a sleigh, turning several corners at a speed that was almost close to the ground, and rushing down rapidly.
Her figure has a clear advantage in the steel frame snowmobile project. She weighs 75 kilograms and slides more quickly than women of standard weight when gliding on the sled. The coach encouraged her to cross the discipline, "This is a new project, and there will be more possibilities when done well." ”
She joined the Steel Frame Snowmobile National Training Team. Zhao Dan, her roommate in the same dormitory as her, is a small man, thin, young, and good at long jumping. The steel frame snowmobile needs to be pushed to assist the run when starting, and then use the inertia of the initial speed to quickly slide down. The members of the training team have their own advantages, mostly from athletics - track and field athletes are explosive, have an advantage in the running stage, and can obtain higher initial speed.
The steel frame bobsleigh national team was established in 2015. In that year, Beijing won the right to host the 2022 Winter Olympics, but of the 109 sub-events to be held at the Beijing Winter Olympics, about 1/3 of the mainland has hardly been carried out. Athletes selected across disciplines always carry the original imprint: the body of wrestling is large, always stable on the snowboard, "more control", and the gymnastics has better balance and flexibility.
Du Xiaojiao's real first slide was from the middle of the mountain and was pushed down by the coach. She heard the wind whistling on either side of her helmet, and her limbs felt cold, and if her head was raised, the wind would drill into her chest.
"It's not so scary." At the end, she secretly breathed a sigh of relief.
freely
It's like pushing open a new door, and no one knows what will be greeted.
Those martial arts students who followed the strict rules arrived in New Zealand, Japan, the United States and Australia, and watched how sheepdogs grazed sheep in New Zealand, how locals shaved sheep, and in the United States to see floating houses floating on the water. They have to learn a foreign language every night. During the break, foreign coaches take them to play go-karts and trampolines, but also in the form of competitions, the first place is awarded ice cream.
"We thought we had no friends, after all, there were opponents around us, but in fact, it was just the opposite." These fourteen- and fifteen-year-old girls value friendship very seriously. Fighting is their daily routine, when Wang Ziyan fell, the martial arts school classmates who practiced double board passed by, they would use their canes to knock on her hat as a greeting.
In the game video that the coach showed them, Wang Ziyan liked czech snowboarder Eva Samkova the most, she called Eva "bearded sister", because Eva would draw two beards on her lips before every big competition. "She wants to ski as well as boys." Wang Ziyan's eyes widened, and she used her hand to imitate Eva on her mouth, "I envy her, oh, she is my goddess, I want to be as strong as her." ”
Wang Xiaobing, a leather child with the idea of "eliminating big deals", really fell in love with skiing after 10 days of training.
His stage is no longer a small trampoline, but an entire ski slope. With the help of the veneer under his feet, he can go where he wants to go, and he can do whatever he wants, in comparison, "the trampoline is too small", and the movement is relatively fixed. As he glides, he can clearly feel more free physically and mentally.
Wang Xiaobing tasted the sweetness of ice and snow sports, suddenly had a goal in life, and wanted to stay and continue the training. Moreover, he fell less often, which made him feel very fulfilled.
This boy who did not hide things in his heart even had a rare insomnia, and played back the wrong movements of training frame by frame in his mind like a movie. He became strict with himself, slipped badly, couldn't eat, and was eager to punch himself twice.
His results have carried the national team round after round of elimination, and in the early training, he even maintained the top five and top ten results.
It took him a year to learn the difficult moves of double 900. This action is extremely dependent on the core strength of the abdomen and the feeling of the air, after each time he vacates, he silently counts in his mind, "1, 2", and after landing, he finds that he has completed two airflips in the air and rotated twice.
He favors unconventional movements and has style. Most of the movements, athletes with the help of uphill, skateboard first and then take off, but he likes the rodeo action, requiring the athlete's body to jump up, jump high, skateboard to keep up, and then take off, so that the body stretches in the air more openly and larger. Sometimes after making this move, he can't help but shout and encourage himself.
Du Xiaojiao also found fun in the training of steel frame snowmobiles. Her speed slowly rose to 120 km/h, equivalent to the top speed of a car on a highway. When she was in good shape, she felt that the resistance of sliding against the wind also became smaller, smooth, and easy to slide.
The sport is obviously a lot more exciting to race boats. Every time she drives at high speed, her spirit must be highly tense and focused, and she must make a timely turning operation when each curve is coming, which is "quite laborious". When she reached the finish line, she still had to wonder, at which bend was it early?
For Wang Ziyan, snowboard obstacle chase is like an adventure. Snowboard obstacle chasing is a racing sport in which they cross various obstacles in the pistes and overtake their opponents and reach the finish line at the fastest speed. She likes to leap over the small platform, and she will shrink her body very small, "like a bird in the air", rising and falling in the snow, like a bird skimming the surface of the water and flying again.
When crossing the wave slope, her body will rise and fall rhythmically with the waves, and her knees will compress and bounce like springs. At this time, the speed is fast, there is no way to brake, if you suddenly brake, "it will be like a car accident, directly overturned on the ground." Another tense moment is to be very close to her opponent, and even when she is on a plane, she is afraid of being overtaken, and she is even more afraid that her opponent will fall and affect herself.
Due to the lack of strength and light weight of the lower limbs, Wang Ziyan could not hold down the skis at first, and her body would have the possibility of dumping in any direction. Slender Wang Ziyan did not want to lose, this beauty-loving girl left after her teammates left every day at dinner, and continued to stuff high-protein foods such as chicken wings and eggs into her stomach, gaining more than 10 pounds. She also adds 100 sit-ups a night before bedtime. She's here like "playing chicken blood" and "for us, the coach doesn't come or not".
pressure
After the first taste of the sweetness of competitive sports, the pressure also followed. When the training team changes the venue, a group of team members will be eliminated. Elimination roll call is usually carried out at the airport, and the two groups of people split up and run to different destinations.
Wang Ziyan described the successive eliminations as making her feel that "there is no end in sight." At the beginning of the elimination, the people who did not leave and those who left cried hard, "and then I got used to it and never cried." She bid farewell to one teammate after another, and when there were only 5 people left in the team of more than 30 people, "I think it was the end of the time" Unexpectedly, the project still has a team in Nanjing, and a dozen girls have emerged, and she must be involved in the new competition.
"We don't know how many people there are, and we don't know how many people they want, only the time is clear." Wang Ziyan said, "Just stick to the 2022 Winter Olympics." ”
She had a concussion when she jumped over the jumping platform, and she would always remember the helplessness of losing control in the air, and the muffled sound of the back of her head hitting the ground. It was the peak of her form, and after that concussion, she was terrified every time she went on the snow. Coupled with the pressure of elimination, she strained her arm and was eliminated in the next test match.
Compared with when she was in good shape, Du Xiaojiao was in a poor state more times. Sometimes the operation is wrong, not only the speed of the steel frame snowmobile taxi decreases, she may also encounter an impact.
The past body advantage made her more seriously injured when she encountered an impact. She weighed wide shoulders, slender limbs, lay on a sled, exposed area larger than others, gravity acceleration, and if an impact occurred, she would hit harder and injure the area more. For a long time, her legs were full of bruises, and she would wake up in pain when she rolled over and slept.
She began to perceive the difference between a rowing boat and a steel-framed snowmobile. Rowing emphasizes teamwork, requiring athletes to have endurance and perseverance. However, the steel frame snowmobile is a personal project that requires judgment and explosiveness.
Her shortcomings began to stand out: she lacked explosive power at the starting stage and ran slowly.
Before the start, foreign audiences used to beat gongs and drums, with "GO! GO！ GO！ With a shout, the athlete can step on the drum and gradually accelerate. She always can't step on the beat, and the cheers of others make her steps more and more chaotic, and in the starting stage, she lags behind others.
"If you can solve the starting problem, plus the weight advantage, you have more advantage."
"One day when it suddenly comes to you, you run fast."
"I always thought you had a play, go to the 2022 Winter Olympics."
She had heard all sorts of expectations and encouragements. When she couldn't improve her starting record for a while, these voices were louder in her ears. She became inferior, self-condemning, in a foreign country, secretly crying a few times.
To encourage herself, she paints on her helmet: astronauts flying in the direction of 2022 in a starry sky. That was her wish.
Neither she nor her teammates was sure she would stay until the end, but one teammate said it would be worth it to be a test skater and show the athletes the way.
Leave the team
At the beginning of 2021, Du Xiaojiao had already finished at the bottom of the team many times in the competition, and she calmly accepted the fact that she ran slowly.
Of course, she loves steel-framed snowmobiles, but she doesn't have to play as an athlete, but really enjoys the excitement and joy of this extremely fast sport.
In March 2021, she returned to the Liaoning Provincial Rowing Team. She also loves rowing, does not reject long endurance training at all, and even enjoys the moment of forcing herself to break through the limit when approaching the physical limit.
Returning to rowing means doubling down on hard work. On the first day of training, during her repetitive endurance training, she felt restless and irritable, and her hands were blistered by the pulp of the ship. She obviously felt that her physical strength was declining, her physical functions were aging, and she used to be able to recover from sleep, but now she had to slow down for half a day.
Her former teammates, who have now entered the rowing national team and won the National Games, sometimes regret the decision to cross the event, but she also knows that she has become more mature and rational now. It was a gift from the steel frame snowmobile to her.
In the nearly four years of preparation for the Beijing Winter Olympics, the initial group of people, at different stages, left the team.
Chen Penbin in Zhejiang Province is one of them. At first, the team chatted with the extreme marathon runner for more than an hour, trying to persuade him to join cross-country skiing, a program known as a "snow marathon." He refused. He grew up on an island in Zhejiang and had never been exposed to skiing.
Two months later, when Chen Pengbin won the 273-kilometer cross-country race in the United States in 33 hours, 21 minutes and 32 seconds, his mentality changed subtly. He had just turned 40 and wanted to challenge more: he wanted to prove that 40-year-old athletes could also participate in the Olympics across disciplines, and he wanted to prove that Southerners could also go to the ice and snow.
The more secretive thought is that he often sees people injured in marathons and is eager to learn more scientific sports knowledge, and the national team can teach him this.
But this marathon champion, although he can learn to run thousands of sets of running moves, but in the ice and snow career that lasted for more than a year, he has never been able to find the power point of skiing, should he use his arms, shoulders, or other parts to work hard?
He realized that it would be difficult to develop cross-country skiing into a sporting strength in a short period of time. It requires generation after generation of athletes, coaches, and auxiliary teams to try many times to form a systematic training system, specific to how much range to train the width of a muscle, what is most suitable for eating, how to massage, stretch.
He found a stage that suited him better, left the cross-country skiing national team, and started a startup that advocated for science sports.
Wang Xiaobing's inflection point arrived in early 2020. During ski training, he accidentally fell, resulting in a crushing fracture of his collarbone. A month later, he had just recovered from his injuries and couldn't help but go to training again and broke his collarbone again.
For athletes, the impact of injuries is more psychological. After recovering from his physical injuries, he became cautious and timid. His progress slowed down and he couldn't keep up with his teammates' training progress.
He needs more time to completely overcome this mentality. But there is not much time left for him, if he can't attend the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics and wait another 4 years, he will be 25 years old and it will be difficult to compete with young, emerging athletes for places in the next Winter Olympics.
What's more, at that time, there were also younger, earlier and talented athletes like Su Yiming who were exposed to skiing. Wang Xiaobing began to consider voluntarily retiring.
Later, he thought that if his personality could be stable and not reckless, maybe there would be no two injuries, he could stay longer in the national team, but ski injuries are common, "it is useless to think about it." He sometimes regrets that if he hadn't studied acrobatics at the age of 12, but started practicing skiing, with his strength, he might have walked more smoothly.
field
After retiring, Wang Xiaobing said goodbye to the trampoline and decided to become a ski instructor, putting happiness first, "I want to skate to the old age." ”
He can finally swing freely on the ski slopes, see the small mountain bag want to jump over, see someone want to go around, no longer have to worry about injuries and recovery. Every day, he goes to the park of the ski resort, where there are shorter and lower-height props, like a miniature version of the big jump and ramp obstacle course training.
His trainees are as young as 4 years old and as old as 50 years old. Classmates at the acrobatic school also became his potential ski students.
On the day Su Yiming entered the final of the men's slope steeplechase at the Beijing Winter Olympics, he was teaching at the Songhua Lake Ski Resort in Jilin Province. Su Yiming came on, he suspended teaching, pulled the students, stood on the snow track, and held his mobile phone to watch the live broadcast of the final.
When he saw That Su Yiming on the screen made a 1800-turn action, Wang Xiaobing couldn't help but shout out, he and the student Science Popularization, "Less than 10 people in the world can do this action", to rotate 5 times in the air.
His favorite snowboarder, Max Parrott, also competed in the competition. Max Parot, 29, was diagnosed with cancer in 2018 and had 12 chemotherapy treatments. Two months after his recovery, Max Parot returned to the ski resort to train and eventually won the gold medal in the men's slope steeplechase sport on snowboarding, with Su Yiming winning silver.
He followed the Beijing Winter Olympics the whole time, and on the night that Su Yiming won the first place in the qualifiers, he drank a big drink to celebrate. On the opening day of the Winter Olympics, Yasuhiro Sato, a common coach of him and Su Yiming and other teammates, sent a long voice in the WeChat group that had been silent for a long time: thank them for their efforts, apologize to those athletes who left the team halfway, and ask for forgiveness.
Those who did not have the opportunity to participate in the team used "must win" and "good luck" to offer blessings to Su Yiming in the group. Wang Xiaobing shouted a Chinese, "Little Mingniu ×!" He knew that Sato could definitely understand this sentence, which was the Chinese word taught by the old players earlier, representing "good", "stick", "love" and "come on".
About one-fifth of the 177 Chinese athletes participating in the Beijing Winter Olympics are from cross-border cross-sports selection, and nearly half of them are cross-border cross-sports athletes in snow sports. "Although it is impossible to participate in the competition, they also have a credit for the 300 million people who participated in the ice and snow." Some people have commented on these eliminated people.
Some of the training team members returned to the provincial team to train, they were the first athletes in their province to practice the project, and they will become the pioneers of the development of these projects in the province.
The ski track is not just left on the slopes. Some people return to the Henan Martial Arts School, walking on the street and thinking about skiing, they will suddenly crouch down and "do a scratching action".
Some martial arts students remember that they learned a lot of life etiquette in training around the world, such as not snoring at meals and looking at each other when talking to elders. Some team members used to leave a training ground every time, and their rooms were a mess. An old professor of Beiti who led the team asked them to pack up their rooms and leave even if they couldn't catch the plane.
Some team members said, "I feel more and more open", I used to blush when I talked to strangers, and I had to think about everything for a long time before I dared to do it. Now, no matter what new things he encounters, he will "try first".
Distance from the Winter Olympics
Wang Ziyan was eliminated and went home. She put away the medals of the Second Youth Association that her parents hung in a prominent position, played at home for 3 months, and lay in bed repeatedly thinking about her mistakes, "always asking herself if I really didn't work hard enough."
But she still loves skiing. On shopping sites, she adds beautiful masks, snow suits, and snow goggles to her favorites, treating skis "more than her own face." Three months later, she returned to The Tagou Martial Arts School and prepared to participate in the single move after 3 years and apply for the ski major of Beiti. She had to pick up the routine, "I definitely have to practice martial arts in martial arts school", but she focused on physical training.
She has never been past the hurdle of being eliminated, and she does not want to watch the snowboarding competition at the Beijing Winter Olympics. On the day of the women's slope obstacle course qualifying, Wang Ziyan, who was taking an online lesson in the room, was pulled by her mother, who said, "You have to insist, there are you here", Wang Ziyan was very angry, but when she saw the Chinese players appear, she did not walk away and watched the whole process. Although Jung "made mistakes from the beginning to the end", Wang Ziyan still wet her eyes when the runners tried their best to slide across the finish line.
Du Xiaojiao's life today is far from ice and snow sports. She was busy fighting the dynamometer with her body.
The dynamometer is a rowing machine, similar to a rowing machine in a gym. In the new competition regulations of rowing, only athletes who meet the dynamometer standard can go to the water to play. In order to achieve the standard faster, Du Xiaojiao took the initiative to formulate a training plan that was in line with her own.
Some changes have already happened - the training habits of the steel frame snowmobile have forced her to be good at thinking, reflect more and judge more in training. In the past, when she was at her best physical strength, she could win the rowing competition by brute force, and she didn't use much skill. But now, she no longer pursues physical fitness as the king, but always thinks about how to draw more scientifically.
She occasionally regretted that when she was training steel frame snowmobiles abroad earlier, she was too busy to ski. The steel-framed bobsleigh and the sled share the same track, but she never experienced the feeling of lying on the sled and sliding down the slide.
In order to experience the joy of ice and snow, she and her friends went to the ice and snow park to play and take photos with the ice piers made of ice. Her helmet, which has a large head and is painted with 2022 expectations, was taken over by a male teammate who was a test skater at the Beijing Winter Olympics after she left the team.
Du Xiaojiao has a new role model in the rowing world - a 30-year-old veteran who returned to the rowing team after giving birth. Although the old team members are not as strong as their younger teammates, the familiar "sense of water" can always help her paddle further as soon as she puts on the paddle. It is a combination of talent, skill, and years of training, and it is not stolen by time.
Du Xiaojiao also hopes that like this old team member, the sports life is longer and longer.
The members of the Rowing Team of Liaoning Province are all aware of the new sport of steel frame snowmobiling because of her. Her former roommate, Zhao Dan, stood at the Winter Olympics as a Chinese female athlete competing in the steel frame snowmobile event for the first time.
On the day of Zhao Dan's competition, Du Xiaojiao did a 5-kilometer dynamometer, 8 sets of strength training, 2 hours of bicycle training, and then, with the current housemate of the rowing team, watched the competition of former housemate Zhao Dan. At the end of the live broadcast, she fell back to sleep. Tomorrow there will be new training waiting for her.
China Youth Daily, China Youth Network reporter Wei Xi Jiao Jingxian Source: China Youth Daily
Source: China Youth Daily