▲【About Failure】Series No. 1
Qi Guangpu closed his eyes and took a deep breath. At the same time, his hands danced along with the torso.
It was the last time he closed his eyes before becoming an Olympic champion. This process is called "imaginary training" in athletic terms.
30 seconds later, Qi Guangpu won the Beijing Winter Olympics freestyle skiing men's aerial skill event with a difficulty factor of 5.0. It has been nine years since he became the first athlete to complete the 5.0 difficulty in international competitions, and 12 years have passed since he first stood on the Olympic field.
In early March, Lazy Bear Sports met Qi Guangpu, who had just finished closed-loop management, in Beijing. Despite his unconcealable Northeastern accent, he is not as humorous and talkative as most Northeastern athletes, and winning or losing is more of a concept than an experience in his eyes. Talking about the experience of the past 3 Olympic Games, he always expressed the same point of view: "I always know that competitive sports are cruel, there can only be one champion, so there are no regrets. ”
He would only open the conversation box when he talked about the topic of aerial skills. Share expertise in how to sense wind speed, adjust speed, observe landing slopes, and more. He still doesn't know how many seconds he can stay in the air, but he can keep his eyes wide open and stare at the whole time as he descends at great speed — including roller coaster rides and bungee jumping.
"It's not a talent, it's a habit that is constantly developed in training."
It's then that you realize that although the athlete sitting in front of you is not very good at speaking golden sentences in dialogue, at the competitive level, he is already a gold medalist standing on the highest podium of the Olympic Games.
Falling from the trampoline to the snow
At the just past Beijing Winter Olympics, two post-00 athletes, Gu Ailing and Su Yiming, presented another possibility of Olympic champions. In addition to the "bitter children", the "slash youth" gradually appeared on the stage of history. The traditional narrative around the "bittersweet and then sweet" of sports has been extended to richer public issues such as education, income, and globalization, and has triggered a national heated discussion far beyond expectations.
The business world has embraced and promoted the "happy" label of sports, hoping to promote it as a way of life for a new generation of young people. Niche sports such as skiing, frisbee, and outdoor hiking are gradually infiltrating urban white-collar weekends, creating another consumer option in addition to movies, shopping, script killings, etc.
The brutal undertones about competitive sports seem to be quietly hidden. At the very least, it no longer occupies the central position of the topic square.
Compared with post-00s athletes such as Su and Gu, Qi Guangpu's sports enlightenment is simple and simple. He was born in Pei County, Xuzhou, Jiangsu Province, and at the age of 4, he was sent by his father to the Xuzhou Skill Team for training.
Today, the Xuzhou Skills Team has become a golden signboard for local sports. As of the 19th Jiangsu Provincial Games in 2018, a total of 16 world champions of trampoline skills have emerged here. Han Xiaopeng, who won the first men's Winter Olympic gold medal for China in 2006, also came out of here.
Compared with such a serious description as "training", Qi Guangpu's memories of the skill team are more of a kind of sports enlightenment based on play. "[The skill team] is an amateur sports school, and it goes after school. When I was a child, I was active, and maybe my family also wanted me to vent my extra energy. The main thing is to turn the heels. ”
In 2000, 10-year-old Qi Guangpu was selected by the Changchun Ski Team.
The decision to transfer was made by his father after communicating with the enlightenment coach Liu Dezhen. At that time, trampoline was not yet an Olympic project, and the transfer to skiing meant that Qi Guangpu would officially enter professional sports training related to the Olympic Games, and also represented leaving his parents and hometown to start another life.
When I first arrived in the northeast, turning over was still an important training program. The difference is that there is an extra pair of roller skates under the feet. "I put on roller skates when I wake up, and I go to bed when I take off my roller skates." This is the beginning of cultivating a sense of gliding.
Life and rhythm also transferred from amateur sports schools to professional sports teams. "In addition to going to class, you can practice up to four times a day."
For a long time in the northeast, Qi Guangpu, who belonged to the ski team, still had no concept of snow. At the beginning of the new century, the development of snow projects in China is still in its infancy. After the dryland skating training, Qi Guangpu put on a snowboard for the first time, stepping on a pile of ice slag on the side of the road.
▲ The street roadside is a common scene of winter sports in the northeast during that period (picture from the TV series "Beyond")
"There was no snow at that time. We waited for the ice rink to be poured in, pulled the discarded ice slag over and spread it on the road, wearing snowboards to simulate the feeling of stepping on the 'snow'. ”
Therefore, today's public description of the cool and fashionable skiing (especially snowboarding) is not valid in qi Guangpu's youth, "then it would be impossible to know that there is also the sport of snowboarding." In the boring ice slag sliding, he even had an "attempted escape", fortunately, the staff of Changchun Railway Station did not sell him tickets.
After being captured by coach Yinggang and returned to the team, Changchun soon snowed. For Qi Guangpu, who grew up in Xuzhou, the freshness brought by the heavy snow quickly covered up the boring and boring training. Qi Guangpu recalls that when it first snowed, he and other friends from the "south" played in the snow for a whole day — like all northeasterners who concept "south", he also classified his hometown Xuzhou as such.
After learning to glide, one of the most important skills is to be able to fall. Rolling forward, rolling backwards, rolling sideways... "falling" is interpreted as the action of falling, often to bring physical loss. Qi Guangpu told Lazy Bear Sports that different slopes and different movements, the pressure required for a moment of falling is different. "If the slope is slower, it hurts the body more, and if the slope is steeper, it will increase the difficulty of successful landing." In short, different angles and distances need to be repeatedly experimented with. ”
For professional skiers. Practicing "falling" has another meaning in the stage of laying the foundation - that is an important process of cultivating a sense of space and direction, Qi Guangpu and his teammates practice falling down the landing slope in various postures, "If you don't know your body posture and position in the air after taking off, it is a very dangerous thing." Therefore, you must first practice falling before you can practice jumping. ”
In fact, not only the enlightenment stage, "wrestling" is the norm that accompanies skiers throughout their careers. In 2009, when he was competing abroad for the first time, Qi Guangpu made a mistake in completing the action, and when he landed, his head fell directly on the simple landing slope set up by wooden scaffolding.
Overcome fear with your eyes
The direct physiological impact of that mistake was that Qi Guangpu rested in bed for a few days because of the concussion. On a psychological level, though, this didn't cast much of a shadow on him. "There was fear, but there was no particular change because of that injury. In fact, I still have fear every time I fall. There is a saying in our line: the more you know, the more afraid you will be. ”
The eyes are the best tool for overcoming fear. Professional aerial skill athletes must keep their eyes open at all times when they are in the air to help the brain build up a perception of space and direction at any time. "It's not a talent, it's a skill that's been trained. Of course, I'm now on the roller coaster and I'm open all the time. ”
After all, the time to fly in the air is very limited, and more often, the important role of the eyes is used to watch videos and observe the field.
Watching videos is an important way to learn. Qi Guangpu told Lazy Bear Sports that he could not only memorize the actions chosen by the outstanding athletes in the aerial skills of the past Olympic Games, but also familiarize himself with the order of appearance, preparation, gliding posture, and celebratory actions after landing. "When training, you can imitate a whole set of imitations."
Some new movements are produced on the basis of such basic imitations. Qi Guangpu's one-arm lifting action during the final jump of the Beijing Winter Olympics was exactly what he and his teammates learned from the video of the famous American freestyle skier Bergstrom.
Another layer of motivation for the breakthrough comes from the brutal format. Unlike other snow sports, aerial skills have long used the single jump rule in the Olympic Games, and even introduced a two-by-two PK elimination system in the summer competition, and stipulated that each round of action can not be repeated. Driven by the format, Qi Guangpu became the world's first athlete to successfully complete the 5.0 difficulty action in the 2013 Freestyle Ski world championships.
If video is likened to a preview, then first-person imagination training is an equally important review session. "Before each game, I will play back the best jump in my heart. The same includes the whole process from preparation to landing. ”
But the so-called "best jump in the heart" changes before each game. The venue is one of the most important variables of the freestyle ski aerial skills program. Since most of the snow fields are built on the mountain, it is destined to vary greatly in the wind speed, wind direction, sunlight and other factors of different venues. Qi Guangpu told Lazy Bear Sports: "Some venues have landing slopes on the shady side, and nothing can be seen from the air. ”
It is for this reason that the process of adapting to the venue before the competition becomes particularly important. In the snow season before the epidemic, the national team played abroad with a high frequency, sometimes reaching a weekly double match. "Basically, it's about arriving, having two days to get used to the training on the field, playing on the third day, and then going to the new playing ground to adapt to the venue, the competition."
During the two-day adaptation time, the adaptation time left for the athletes each day generally does not exceed 3 hours, and the actual number of exercises does not exceed 6 times. In this process, athletes need to establish a preliminary judgment on the slope, speed, snow quality, etc. of the slide, and then combine the feeling after the jump and imagine the training to simulate the feeling of the game before the game.
"So after that concussion, my first reaction wasn't actually fear, but thinking back to the jumping process to find out which link was wrong."
Like looking for the ground with open eyes, the playback and imagination training of each action has become another instinct learned by every aerial skill athlete.
Courage to open up
Qi Guangpu experienced the cruel side of competitive sports very early on.
In 2010, the first time he participated in the Olympic Games, he experienced a serious mistake by Han Xiaopeng, a fellow villager in Pei County. Not only was the defending champion eliminated in the preliminaries, but the injury forced him to retire at the age of 28.
"Competitive sports have only one championship and not everyone has a chance to succeed in the end."
Although he was the first athlete in the world to successfully complete the 5.0 difficulty in the competition, Qi Guangpu never successfully made this move in the Olympic arena before the Beijing Winter Olympics. He once described the difficulty of the action himself: "10 attempts may only succeed 3 times." ”
At some point, the name "freestyle skiing" is very confusing. In fact, the rules require that every jump of the contestant must be reported to the referee team before departure, and cannot be played on the spot. "If you temporarily change the action after departure, it is 0 points; if you complete the declaration action, even if you turn half a circle, you can only multiply the difficulty coefficient you filled in in advance."
Therefore, teamwork has become an indispensable and important part of victory. They will make different difficulty plans for each kind of draw before the game, and there are two coaches on the starting and jumping platforms who can communicate the details of wind speed, wind direction and other details with headsets at any time...
Each jump is different, with the ski trails of the front athletes altering the speed and snow quality of the slides.
Of the six players who participated in the final round of the Beijing Winter Olympics, a total of 5 came up with a difficulty factor of 5.0. Qi Guangpu jokingly said that if he had not challenged the highest difficulty again and again, the athletes would not have been so inward-looking. He dug a hole for himself, so he also had to push the limits to be at the top.
Slide, vacate, and churn in the air for 3 weeks to connect the body at 1800 degrees.
This time Qi Guangpu succeeded.
Mr. Qi said he had never counted how many seconds he could fly in the air with each jump, but he could clearly hear the instructor's instructions coming from the ground each time. "They would tell me how to adjust my posture."
This is the real situation that every Olympic athlete must face, even if they are at a high place, enjoying the scenery is still a luxury.
This restraint happens all the time. Six days before the men's singles final, Qi Guangpu won his first medal in four Olympic games in a mixed team competition. But instead of celebrating, he took care of going to bed early. "It's not that I'm not excited, it's because I have to take a break to prepare for my personal event." He chose to come up with a 5.0 move again, because "in the face of opportunities, you have to be open-minded." ”
At the beginning of April, Qi Guangpu was awarded the title of "Individual with Outstanding Contribution to the Beijing Winter Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games". Next, he will enter Harbin Institute of Technology for a ph.D. in mechanics, and he hopes to help him in his future training and competitions by learning to understand the sport of freestyle skiing aerial skills more deeply, and he also hopes to help more athletes with the power of knowledge.
But his dream of the Olympics is not over. After winning the gold medal, Qi Guangpu said that he still had a small wish at the Beijing Winter Olympics that had not been realized, that is, to surpass the highest score of his career. He wanted to save the achievement of this goal for the next time, perhaps in Italy in four years. He was always fascinated by the rules of winning or losing by jumping, "you have to go all out and have no reservations." ”
This is also the world of competition that has remained unchanged for decades in his eyes, "it is precisely because of cruelty that it is wonderful." And that "high place" can only be reached by Qi Guangpu, arriving again and again, returning again and again - jumping, it is another world.
Disclaimer: This article is original by Lazy Bear Sports and may not be reproduced without authorization.