At the 2004 Athens Olympics, the 21-year-old Lin Dan debuted on the Olympic stage as the world number one, but he did not expect that he was directly eliminated in the first round against Singapore's Susilo, a champion-aimed player who returned home in the first game, and his impetuous personality was the other side of his violent style of play.
A superstar's road to conquest will never be smooth, Lin Dan's journey is to break the doubt began, when the young Lin Dan was out of the first round in many competitions, the title of "Lin Yi Round" is like the sword of Damocles hanging over his head, compared to the low-key, calm Guoyu Brother in the past, Lin Dan seemed a little frivolous, and people thought that the more calm Bao Chunlai was more worthy of expectation.
He once said: "The reason I regained my strength was that I had no way out, I didn't make excuses for myself, I didn't give myself any leeway, and I took everything very lightly." ”
His life was a little crazy when he was young, and in his heyday, he despised his opponents and retained a little pride, and even in the decline of his state, he still insisted that people saw his stubbornness, which belonged to Lin Dan's "arrogant and stubborn" badminton life.
Lin Dan was born on October 14, 1983 in Linjiang Town, Shanghang County, Longyan City, Fujian Province, when he was a child, his mother always liked to dress him as a girl, and he still had long hair, coupled with the family's "Dan Dan, Dan Dan" call, this little girl image can be called the domineering Lin Dan's "black history".
Lin Dan's father loved sports, and the best in China at that time was table tennis and volleyball. Once, Lin Dan went to the county gymnasium to play, the first time he came into contact with badminton, he watched other children swing and catch the ball and became interested.
At the age of 5, he joined the Shanghang County Badminton Amateur Class, and a few years later his name will be engraved into the history of badminton.
Because the tendons are very hard, he is most afraid of pressing his legs, and he cries in pain every time, and this year in Penang, Malaysia, there is also a boy with very strong tendons who is often hung on the door by his family, because he wants him to grow taller, his name is Li Zongwei.
Although the training is very hard, but Lin Dan did not say that he did not want to practice, the weekend team to practice long-distance running, around the Upper Hangzhou two laps, many senior students can not persist, but Lin Dan can run down, he can not run to the front of the team, but he just does not fall behind, gritting his teeth to persevere.
In this way, he ran and ran into the Fujian Provincial Sports School to Fuzhou, 600 kilometers away from Shanghang County.
At the age of 12, Lin Dan had won the men's singles championship of the national children's badminton competition, and he thought that he could enter the Fujian provincial team with this honor, but what he did not expect was that most of the students in the sports school were picked up by the Fujian team, while he still stayed in the sports school.
He felt abandoned by the Fujian team, which hit him a lot, but at this time, the Bayi team threw an olive branch, and at the age of 12, he packed his bags and became a soldier again away from home. He said: "I used to like Jordan and those people, and then I only worshiped soldiers. ”
He was too young, even the smallest military uniform looked like a "sack" to Lin Dan, "I remember my mother helped me pull in my pants a lot, so that I could barely walk without tripping." At the age of 15, he entered the national youth team and participated in the 1998 Asian Youth Championship, and was directly out of the first round.
He was severely criticized by the coach, who was told to go to the auditorium for a meeting that day, and as a result, the coach told him that he could not use it, and he had been expelled from the national youth team.
"At that time, it was completely incomprehensible to me, or it should be a shame, because I felt that it was difficult to enter the national team again after being removed from the list like this." In the face of all this, 15-year-old Lin Dan seems at a loss.
Time into the new century, in 2000, the badminton team at that time experienced the departure of coaches such as Li Mao, the rise of athletes from Indonesia, South Korea, Denmark and other countries, and the Breakthrough of Men's Gold Medal Zero for the National Feather at the Sydney Olympic Games.
At that year's selection competition, Lin Dan left the impression of disobedience to the coaches, and he was not in the first batch of selection lists. Later, it was the bayi team coach Gao Lu Jiangtuo who forced Lin Dan to "stuff into the national team", so he became a transfer student of the national team.
The players on the team looked down on him and thought he was a "relation", he was assigned to the basement of the renovated dormitory, which was cold and damp, wanted to text his family, had to stand up to find a signal, he knew that he could only change all this by relying on the racket in his hand, one by one.
A year and a half later, Lin Dan finally moved out of the basement and lived in the upstairs dormitory. At that time, Ji Xinpeng retired, Xia Xuanze, Sun Jun and others could not survive the next Olympic cycle, and Lin Dan and Bao Chunlai and others were regarded as the hope of the rise of the national feather.
Here he also met a female player, and in the future his and her story became the fairy tale of Kuniwa.
In 2002, Lin Dan won his first international title at the Korea Open, which he turned to 81 when he retired.
National team hope, world number one, king of the open... Lin Dan took these labels to the Thomas Cup held in May 2004, when Lin Dan shouldered the responsibility of regaining the soup cup for the men's team for 10 years, as the number one main player, he started the game and won all the victories, facing the Danish star Gad in the final, he withstood the pressure to defeat his opponents, after the game he stripped to celebrate, screaming in the sky, domineering.
He said to head coach Li Yongbo: "In the future, you will introduce me as a world champion, and I will be an Olympic champion in the future." This kind of arrogance is extremely rare in the badminton team that has always been low-key, but it is also arrogant and arrogant, and soon Lin Dan will have the biggest setback of his career - the first round loss at the Athens Olympic Games.
"You want to know your biggest problem, and only your opponent can tell you. I lost to Susilo, but he told me what to do next. It was a brittle defeat, but it was also a beginning for Lin Dan, and in the face of verbal criticism from various media, his mother would even go online and "hate each other" with netizens.
After that game, Lin Dan changed a lot, he no longer overstated, he respected the efforts of his opponents, and the only thing left was the celebratory military salute, "Beijing Olympic Games, I want to get back all that I lost." ”
So in the cycle of the Beijing Olympic Games, he trained more actively, began to adjust his mentality, worked hard to figure out tactics, won three consecutive open championships, he is still the world number one, "I don't want to sink myself for too long because of this matter." ”
During this period, his opponent also changed from Tawfik to Li Zongwei, and the duel between Lin and Li opened another brilliant era of badminton. But as the Olympic Games approached, his heart pressure was getting bigger and bigger, in the semi-final of the 2008 Soup Cup, Lin Dan defeated Li Zongwei, at this time there were 3 months before the opening of the Olympic Games, he was anxious in his heart, every day he wanted to how to beat Li Zongwei, every day training to break two rackets, for this reason Li Yongbo even stipulated that no one else in the team could use Lin Dan's type of racket, just to find a state for him.
On July 17, 2008, in the men's singles final of the badminton hall of Beijing University of Technology, Li Zongwei said: "I have never seen Lin Dan play so fast. He had never seen Lin Dan with such a sharp look in his eyes.
Every time he won a point, Lin Dan trotted around the field and shouted to cheer himself up, he wanted to win too much, after winning, Lin Dan excitedly threw the racket into the sky, excitedly played a few rolls on the ground, hugged tightly with the coaches, and all his pressure, indignation, silence, and frivolity were released at that moment.
Four years later in London, it was the final again, and it was Lin Dan and Li Zongwei, the two staged a classic battle, they played all the way to the decider, played to the final match point, Lin Dan reversed the 21:19 in the final set of thrilling victory, becoming the first player who can defend the Olympic badminton men's singles championship.
Prior to that, he was a Full Slam champion who was an Olympic champion, a World Championship champion, a World Cup champion, an Asian Games champion, an Asian Championship champion, a All England champion and several BWF Super Series champions.
The first male player in the history of badminton is lindane. After London, many people thought he was about to retire, and it is true that he was resting almost throughout 2013, and the world ranking fell to 200 places, but he did not adjust to his best at the World Championships that year, but won the championship as a 286th ranked wild card player.
At that time, some people said that he hindered the small players behind him for his own sake, but all the victories of competitive sports are based on strength, and there is never a "concession", "Compared with those athletes who are the same year or younger than him, Lin Dan may love this sport more." His coach had said of him.
In 2015, Lin Dan began to "fly alone" to support himself by commercial sponsorship and bonuses, while paying 15% of the annual share to the badminton team, he has always been the top five superstars in the commercial value of the Chinese sports industry, he tries to change, even not cling to the gold medal, is purely want to try to make the sport affect more people, "win or lose, champions, those are not the most important to me, otherwise year after year, it will only make me tired." ”
He lost to his old rival Li Zongwei in the semi-finals of the Rio Olympics and ended up finishing fourth, but the 33-year-old Lin Dan seems to have looked down on the results, saying that it was not until the age of 30 that he really discovered the charm of badminton and began to be fascinated by the sport.
Out of the badminton team, he can recruit his own team training, and decide how long he can play, and finally his career stopped in July 2020, "2000-2020, a full 20 years, I also have to say goodbye to the national team, it turns out that it is really difficult to say... After four Olympic journeys, I have never thought about leaving, nor do I want to think about it. I dedicate everything to this sport I love."
The 37-year-old Lin Dan ended his 20-year career with less than 500 words of essays, but behind it were 666 victories, 81 titles including 20 world championships, 6 Thomas Cups, 5 Sudirman Cups, 5 World Championships, 2 Olympic gold medals... In an interview early years, he said: "My desire is to become the best badminton player in history after retiring. ”
Obviously, he did it, in addition to badminton being with him for so many years, Xie Xingfang was also there.
Compared with the national table tennis attitude of blocking the love affair within the team, Guo Yu has always been open to the love between the team members, taking Li Yongbo's words: "I am not opposed to the love of the team members, if the results have no impact, there is no bad social impact, why should I interfere?" ”
"I fell in love with Xie Xingfang at first sight at the age of 14" That year he was a young player of the Bayi team, and Xie Xingfang was only an unknown player in the Guangdong team," At that time, Ah Fang seemed to be still playing doubles, and she cut a neat short hair. We exclaimed in the stands: Wow, the legs are so long, so tall. This is probably the most beautiful girl in badminton."
In a mixed training session of the national team, Lin Dan lost to Xie Xingfang, and the coach scolded angrily: "What are you kid doing, you can't beat a female player?" What else do you want to be a world champion? ”
Perhaps the coach did not expect that this Bolindan was in the atmosphere, and Xie Xingfang had just noticed the existence of Lin Dan at that time, but his first impression was that "if he didn't play well, he would fall off the racket, and if he played well, he would run around on the field." ”
In fact, Xie Xingfang is two years older than Lin Dan, and this feeling was finally made public after Lin Dan led Guo Yu to regain the soup cup in 2004, and he kissed Xie Xingfang in the audience, after which Lin Dan only had Xie Xingfang until the "forgot to close the curtains" incident.
Lin Dan gave a statement to Li Yongbo: "My love will not affect the competition and training, not only I want to win the world championship, I will also help Xiaofang to win the world championship together." ”
A year later, Xie Xingfang won her first world championship, but lost to Zhang Ning in the final of the Olympic Games, and Xie Xingfang retired in 2009 at the age of 28 to become the woman behind Lin Dan.
Lin Dan, who had just defended his Olympic men's singles title in 2012, had a grand wedding at the Badminton Hall of Beijing University of Technology, where he and Xie Xingfang played in the men's and women's singles finals four years ago. Li Yongbo read the oath as the main marriage, and he witnessed the love and career of the two throughout the process.
Xie Xingfang became Xian Nei to help her husband expand her business territory, but in November 2016, the "model couple" in the sports industry encountered a fatal crisis, and Someone photographed Lin Dan and a woman intimately entering and leaving the hotel, while Xie Xingfang was still in confinement.
Because the window was not closed Lin Dan was also photographed kissing the picture, Lin Dan took advantage of his wife's pregnancy to cheat almost already is already a "real hammer", and later he urgently apologized, and Xie Xingfang also chose to support her husband, so that the crisis could be passed, but Guo Yu was already on the decline at that time, he was the façade of Guo Yu, and this storm showed how chaotic the internal management was.
But these "moral flaws" can not summarize Lin Dan's greatness as an athlete, his career can be called magnificent, in the past or in the future may not have many years close to his achievements of the players appear, not to mention his long-term maintenance of high standards, he for the Chinese badminton thinking to make innovations, he is not only the name recorded in the history of Chinese badminton, but also an unattainable monument, his arrogance and stubbornness, regret and self-awakening, he has failed, sunk, regretted, But none of this can stop his desire for victory, as he says: "Badminton for me, not a championship, nor a moment of joy or sadness, but a process from beginning to end." 」 ”