"Cross-border training, cross-discipline selection": achieving a new generation of outstanding athletes - from the Beijing Winter Olympics to think of the bits and pieces.
Columnist: Some talk
On February 20, 2022, the Beijing Winter Olympics came to a successful conclusion. In just 17 days, the Chinese delegation not only completed the goal of participating in the whole project, but also created a new record in the number of gold medals and medals won.
The 177 Chinese athletes participating in the Beijing Winter Olympics came from 20 provinces (autonomous regions and municipalities) across the country, about one-fifth of whom did not specialize in ice and snow sports training from the beginning of their sports careers; nearly half of them were cross-border cross-border athletes. Yan Wengang from Tianjin, originally a long jumper, became the only player in mainland China to win a medal through cross-border cross-discipline selection through nearly 6 years of professional training in steel frame snowmobiles. Yan Wengang was 19 years old when he transitioned to winter sports in 2016.
Yan Wengang in the competition
The two little heroes of the post-00s Winter Olympics who are sought after by the whole people, Gu Ailing and Su Yiming, have undoubtedly become the top stars who currently crush the two worlds of culture and sports through their brilliant achievements of two gold and one silver and one gold and one silver, as well as their outstanding comprehensive quality performance on public/social media.
Strictly speaking, Su Yiming, who was only 14 years old at the time, was only a ski enthusiast who was keen on acting before joining the "national team training system" in 2018; the talented girl Gu Ailing's expertise and hobbies were more extensive, such as track and field, basketball, ballet, piano, singing, model performance and mathematics. Just as dazzling as Gu Ailing's Olympic medals are Stanford's acceptance letters.
Gu Ailing, Su Yiming and others at the closing ceremony
As we all know, the two talented players have encountered no small "setbacks" in the process of competing in Beijing. However, in the face of defeat, their confidence was not defeated, but they dared to challenge - by increasing the technical difficulty coefficient, the follow-up project action was perfectly presented and successfully counterattacked. Although both are participating in the Olympic Games for the first time, the self-confidence and self-psychological adjustment ability displayed by the two talented youngsters in the World Series are in stark contrast to their actual age. What impressed us even more was that winning the Olympic gold medal seemed so easy and comfortable for them.
So, is it really that easy to win on the pinnacle stage of world competitive sports?
In August 2004, scientists at the world-renowned Australian Institute of Sport (AIS) focused all their chips on overall athletic ability that was not related to the specific project itself. They plan to spend a year and a half training to train a female athlete for the country who is eligible to participate in the ice bobsleigh event at the 2006 Winter Olympics in Turin, Italy. At the time, however, they set their sights on women who had competed in athletics, gymnastics, water sledding or surfing. Colleagues throughout the bobsleigh industry say, "You will never succeed, this project is an art that takes time to understand."
It is true that the athletes recruited by the Australian Institute of Sport do not have any previous experience in ice sports, but they are top athletes with a comprehensive range of conditions. Melissa Hoar, a former World Surfing Lifesaver World Champion and EMMA SHEERS, a former World Bobsleigh Champion, were taken to Calgary, Canada for an ice trial.
It turns out that the "feeling" of ice doesn't seem so important. Ten weeks after her first on the ice, Melissa Hall beat half of the skaters at the 23rd Bobsleigh World Championships and won the following tournament. Former beach sprinter Michelle Steele also advanced to qualify for the Winter Olympics in Turin, Italy. Scientists at the Australian Institute of Sport published a paper titled "14 Months, 'Ice Rookie' Goes to the Winter Olympics", which has also entered the annals of sports history.
Australian Institute of Sport (AIS)
Australia has always been a world leader in the field of "cross-discipline selection and cross-border training". Beginning in 1994, in preparation for the 2000 Sydney Olympics, they embarked on a "national star search program" that focused on physical fitness and body-building tests for 14- to 16-year-olds. At the Sydney Olympics that year, the Australian sports delegation with a population of only 19 million won a total of 58 medals, that is, 3.03 medals per 1 million citizens, which is almost 10 times the proportion of medals in the United States that year.
Before the London 2012 Olympic Games, the United Kingdom also followed Australia's systematic re-planning of its Olympic material selection strategy: highlighting cross-border material selection, which also achieved success. Among them, the story of a legendary athlete is thought-provoking: CHRISSIE Wellinton, a legendary British triathlete and a well-known author and philanthropist.
Wellington spent her childhood in a small village in the east of England, and from an early age she was not interested in intense sports, but she did participate in many sports such as running, hockey, five-person basketball and swimming. At the age of 15, in preparation for school exams, Wellington turned down professional swimming club training arranged for her by her parents. Later, Wellington graduated with distinction from the University of Birmingham and pursued a master's degree at the Centre for International Development at the University of Manchester. She then joined the British government and participated in the drafting of the British policy of assisting Iraq in its post-war reconstruction. But as he pushed through policy reforms, Wellington grew tired of bureaucracy within the government.
In 2004, she traveled alone to war-torn Nepal and began helping to advance sewage cleanup projects. But it was in the Himalayas that she gradually developed the idea of pursuing a professional triathlon. At that time, she had no experience with road bikes at all, and the first time she sat on a bicycle seat was at the age of 27! She rode her bike through the Himalayan mountains above 4,500 meters above sea level, training in natural intensity, while beginning to discover her talent in endurance sports and decided to take a shot at the pinnacle of the project.
In February 2007, Wellington became a professional triathlete at the age of 30. After a short period of professional training, she won the World Series on 13 October of the same year, leaving her nearest athlete behind her for nearly 2 minutes, a victory praised by the British Triathlon Association.
Wellington has competed in 13 official competitions throughout her professional career, including four world championships in the event, and has never lost. At the World Championships in Germany, she finished with 8 hours, 18 minutes and 13 seconds, breaking the world record at the time, a full half hour faster than the world record before she began competing in the Triathlon professional event in 2007, and her performance was only behind the four best male athletes in the world.
Wellington later mentioned that receiving a good education played a key role in self-discovery, self-motivation and self-restraint, and that she relied on her talent and self-motivation to show the world a typical case of "late success".
Legendary athlete Krish Wellington
The growth story of another well-known world sports star, tennis legend Federer, is also a classic.
Federer's South African mother is a tennis coach, but interestingly she never taught her son. While Federer was still toddler, he played soccer around his mother; as a child he began playing squash with his father, and later tried skiing, wrestling, swimming and skateboarding, as well as basketball, handball, tennis and table tennis. It wasn't until he was a teenager that Federer decided to give up his favorite sport - football, practicing tennis... In the future, he was able to have excellent athletic talent and superb hand-eye coordination, thanks to his experience in many sports.
At the same time, facts have also proved that although Federer clarified his specific goals later, it did not affect his later development in the slightest. Many tennis superstars usually retire around the age of thirty, and Federer is still active in tennis at the age of forty (2021) and ranks in the top ten in the world.
Tennis legend Federer
At present, there are a large number of studies in the field of international sports science that show that athletes who carry out targeted or specialized training too early are either meaningless or harmful to their careers.
In particular, scientists have found in CGS sports, sports that can be measured with distance, weight and time (such as cycling, athletics, sailing, swimming, skiing and weightlifting), etc., if the age of 15 is used as the dividing line, and children like Federer who have been trained in a wide range of sports will perform better in adulthood than children who have received specialized training before the demarcation age.
Of course, the outstanding coaches in the sports world are also well versed in the integration of "the stone of his mountain can attack the jade". Akatyev, the legendary coach of early Soviet football, not only played well at his youth, but also taught fencing at the Frunze Military Academy. He deeply understood the similarity between the "blocking and backspinning" tactics of fencing and the defensive counterattack in football, and placed this analogical description in the 1946 monograph Football Tactics, which was regarded by coaches throughout Eastern Europe for many years.
In modern football, such cases are also not rare. In 2003, Premier League coach ALAN CURBISHLEY appointed WAYNE DIESEL, a South African sports medicine specialist, as the club's medical director, after which Wynne worked for the well-known professional rugby club. Wynne quickly brought about various changes to the team, such as an ice bath after training. In the absence of excellent hardware facilities at that time, a large trash can was found to temporarily replace it, and even if the club's biggest star, paolo di canio, was full of doubts and reluctance, he had to "jump into the ice bath" - in fact, such rehabilitation has long been common in rugby.
Wynn's cross-border innovation has not stopped, and he has integrated the Sports Research Department and the Sports Medical Department... Again, these ideas were later successfully brought to Tottenham Hotspur, which is why Mourinho joined Tottenham with only a small number of assistant coaches – all the professional support teams are already in place!
WAYNE DIESEL AT TOTTENHAM
Wyne's impressive work at Premier League clubs gave him the opportunity to move to the NFL's Miami Dolphin Club in 2015 to form a strong athletic performance division – in fact, 11 years later than former German national football head coach Klinsmann brought in rehabilitation and special coaches for the German national team from the United States. Klinsmann also invited German meritorious hockey coach Petters to join the coaching staff, which not only caused an uproar in the German football world, but also was questioned, until the German national team won the excellent results of Euro 2006, and the doubts gradually subsided.
Klinsmann and his successor Löw
For example, the British cycling team before 2003 can be said to be useless. In the last 110 years of history, not a single medal has been won at the Tour de France or the World Series. But just five years later, at the 2008 Beijing Olympics, the British team won 60% of the gold medals; in the 2012 "Tour de France", the British won their first championship; at the 2014 London Olympics, the team broke 9 Olympic records and 7 world records... Since then, the British team has been unsustainable in all areas of the project, including roads, venues, mountains and BMX.
All this success is due to DAVE BRAISFORD, the British Cycling Association's director of athletic performance, appointed in 2003.
Dave had never worked as a professional coach before, he was the general manager of sky cycling clubs, and then a salesman, which meant that he was a sports manager and businessman in his own business. But it was his broad vision that brought the "marginal gains" of economics to the overall training strategy of the team. Dave has broken down the elements that make the team perform well in the race into an infinite number of modules on hardware and software, each requiring 1% improvement per day. Although there is only a slight progress every day, under the action of "the compound interest effect of time", it will become excellent, which is the difference between success and failure, which is the so-called "walking a thousand miles".
More importantly, Dave has promoted cross-border cooperation with experts in many fields, such as psychology, medicine, environmental color, materials science and dynamics. He is committed to advancing the collaboration of technical training, equipment development, research data and even business models with F1 teams. Dave's great achievements in the field of cycling led him to win the BBC Coach of the Year award twice in 2008 and 2012. The "1% theory" advocated by him has been highly praised and widely disseminated inside and outside the sports world, and the British Ministry of Education regards it as one of the principles of policy formulation, and Harvard University has written the "1% theory" into business management textbooks.
Dave Braceford's "1% Theory" is now written into business management textbooks
Through the vivid cases of these world's top athletes and coaches, can we further think deeply: since the prehistoric era, the early human life began to appear for the purpose of victory, primitive and quaint sports competitions, and then to the ancient Greece wrestling as the starting point for the development of competitive sports, until the modern and contemporary variety of sports "competitive sports" competitions... In addition to constantly challenging the limits of human physical sports, on the basis of the "faster, higher, stronger" that we have been pursuing for nearly 120 years, what other areas can be deeply explored in the winning way of various competitive competitions?
The topic is big, but at least we can get some inspiration from the above cases:
As modern Homo sapiens, our greatest strength is actually the antithesis of high level of specialization – the ability to combine a wide range of knowledge and experience. In all walks of life, many so-called "successful people" who have achieved certain achievements can mostly draw knowledge from various sources, and then find potential "connection points" in various fields, and then creatively apply this knowledge to other fields in an analogous way, while being good at breaking down "cognitive barriers".
Needless to say, modern society needs generalists who can connect seemingly distant and unrelated fields. For example, going back to competitive sports, this means that the breadth of athletes' "training" is highly likely to herald the breadth of transformation. That is, the more knowledge or background content a trainer/learner acquires, the richer the abstract model they create and the less they rely on specific concrete examples.
In the final of the Beijing Winter Olympic Freestyle Ski Women's Big Jump, Gu Ailing scored the highest score of 94.5 in the third jump with the super difficulty of completing 1620. After the game, she said, "This [action] was something I thought about last week during training, and I've never done it on the snow. After the second jump, I only finished second, so I chose this action as the triple jump", and she succeeded. This phenomenon of unconscious simulation is called "meditation" in sports psychology. Yes, although Gu Ailing has never practiced this particular action in training, she uses the extensive and rich knowledge and skills she has mastered in the past (as mentioned earlier, athletics, ballet, mathematics, etc.), and by stimulating certain muscle memories, she perfectly embodies the abstract model formed in the concept of consciousness.
Similarly, we do not know what specific role film and television performances have on Su Yiming's Olympic games, but it is obvious that performance first requires actors to have the ability to imitate body and language, as well as a sense of substitution on the stage or in front of the camera, and even enter the state of "no self" and "forgetfulness"; at the same time, guitar playing as a hobby and singing talent performance training have a positive impact on his action skills and psychological quality of his snowboard projects.
Unfortunately, in the mainland's traditional athlete system, geniuses similar to the backgrounds of Gu Ailing and Su Yiming are indeed rare. What is gratifying, however, is that another sports hero who also won the love of the general public appeared during the Winter Olympics: Shui Qingxia, the head coach of the Chinese women's football team.
At the beginning of the Year of the Tiger in 2022, Shui Qingxia led the Chinese women's football team to regain the Asian championship trophy after many years of absence, bringing a glimmer of light and dignity to chinese football that has been mired in the mire. If you look at her glorious athlete growth history, you will be surprised to find that Shui Coach did not switch to football until the age of 17, and before that she was a professional track and field athlete, focusing on long jump and pentathlon.
With the unprecedented success of the Beijing Winter Olympics, a new round of national fitness and love of sports has been set off across the country. Especially in the young generation after 00, driven by the influence of the new generation of sports idols established by Gu Ailing and Su Yiming, as long as we uphold the spirit of science and maintain an open attitude, we will surely find more athletes with excellent potential in a broader field. Maybe they are "not doing the right thing" now, maybe some of them are still "in the twilight", and some are even "too late"... But who can say that God must close that window when he opens the door to success for them?!
Let's boldly imagine that in the future, we may be able to look forward to whether in the head coach position of leading athlete selection and training, or the leadership position of sports management department, can we use more composite "Bole" with cross-border thinking and general knowledge transformation ability, as well as industry leaders who are not afraid of "whimsical ideas" and can "win by surprise"?
We'll see.