Two self-help by a world champion

Dong Shunjiang in competition training. Photo courtesy of Dong Shunjiang

31-year-old Dong Shunjiang has experienced two self-rescues, the first time, he caught the light leaking through the cracks of bricks and found life from the ruins of the earthquake; Another time, in the darkest moment of losing his right leg, he forced himself into a wheelchair and countered with a tennis racket ready to strike back with a fateful serve.

At the end of each month, the Sichuan Provincial Disabled Tennis Team will play intra-team competitions. As a wheelchair tennis player, Dong Shunjiang's opponents are often hearing-impaired tennis players with sound limbs. The hearing impaired player has fast ball speed and good technique, "equivalent to the level of able-bodied people." This is the request of coach Zhu Lin, in her opinion, this fast-paced ball will drive Dong Shunjiang to launch the wheelchair faster to deal with the ball at different landing points, so as to improve his technical ability more effectively.

In the rules of wheelchair tennis, the ball is allowed to bounce to the ground twice, but in the face of a ball with a speed of 150 km / h, Dong Shunjiang has to use the wheelchair to "race" with the ball, and also accurately hit the ball, in addition to testing rapid reaction, there are also skilled wheelchair control skills, "you have to make the wheelchair a part of the body, the cooperation of people, wheelchairs and rackets to form muscle memory", only in this way, can we fundamentally improve the power and accuracy of batting.

But when he first came into contact with a wheelchair, Dong Shunjiang was very resistant, because in his eyes, accepting a wheelchair meant accepting the reality that he had changed from an able-bodied person to a disabled person, when he was 16 years old.

On May 12, 2008, like a matchbox shaken by someone, the dormitory building of Muyu Junior High School in Qingchuan County, Sichuan Province was violently shaken. Dong Shunjiang, a second-year junior high school student, woke up from his lunch break, he stepped on his shoes and ran from the second floor to the hall, although the classmates rushed together, but in his memory, the corridor was very wide, "I couldn't find a wall to support", when he was about to run out of the school, two junior classmates fell in front of him, Dong Shunjiang pulled them up, he told the reporter of Zhongqing Daily and Zhongqing Net, "It's not a rescue, it's instinctively helped."

Bricks fell and buildings collapsed.

As the crying and cries for help became clear, Dong Shunjiang gradually woke up from the coma, and after hearing that some classmates encouraged each other, he began to check his body, "his right leg was crushed", and he didn't care about the pain, "The whole thought is that he must climb out." Dong Shunjiang, who was buried in a shallow layer, could see the ground through the cracks in the bricks, he used all his strength to remove the remnants of bricks in front of him, and after struggling for more than 10 minutes, he moved to the ground with his broken right leg, he saw the sky again, and the sound in the ruins just now disappeared.

"The old saying in the village calls 'crippled' for the disabled, as if to remind me that maybe in the future I will be a 'wasted person' and I can't do anything." Dong Shunjiang's family is poor, and as a boy who is counted on by the family, he tries to pretend to be strong. On a hot day, he also wore trousers and hid the prosthesis of his right leg, even if he couldn't help but stagger during the run-in with the prosthesis, he was reluctant to use crutches, let alone use a wheelchair, "At that time, I felt that sitting in a wheelchair was a sign of acknowledging his disability, and he did not accept it psychologically." ”

The school will be rebuilt on the same site, with new classrooms in nearby board houses, where "the old school can be seen every day". Dong Shunjiang was surrounded by memories and emotions every day, and his teachers and classmates took good care of him, making him "grateful but very burdened", and he once felt that he had nowhere to run. At the beginning of 2009, the Sichuan Provincial Disabled Persons' Federation recruited disabled athletes in the Qingchuan disaster area, "I have been active since I was a child, I like to climb trees, play badminton and table tennis, and dreamed of becoming a basketball player." For Dong Shunjiang, this is an inevitable way out.

But in several advantageous sports such as table tennis and badminton, Dong Shunjiang was defeated, and his last chance came from the newly established Sichuan wheelchair tennis team. Although Li Na had just made a historic breakthrough by reaching the women's singles semifinals at the Beijing Olympics, tennis is still a sport that Dong Shunjiang has "never heard of" in Qingchuan, 1,600 kilometers away.

The coach demonstrated the basic movements of a tennis ball, and Dong Shunjiang imitated playing two balls, "The killing ball of tennis is similar to badminton, and the ball drawing is similar to table tennis." He was immediately attracted and took the initiative to ask the coach: "Can I fight standing without a wheelchair?" But the coach asked rhetorically: "Without a wheelchair, where can you get wheelchair tennis?" ”

To restart the life he wants, Dong Shunjiang has to face the reality he has always avoided, "In order to play well, I can use a wheelchair." With the donation of caring people, he got a living wheelchair, he was very thin at that time, "that wheelchair is wide enough to seat 3 me", his arms have to be like open wings to slide the wheelchair, but every day on the uneven dirt road in the village, people can always see Dong Shunjiang sitting in a wheelchair with a posture of "taking off" to go back and forth.

In April 2009, Dong Shunjiang became one of the first athletes on the Sichuan wheelchair tennis team, a late starter that supported a group of people who had the same experience as him. What touched Dong Shunjiang the most was that coach Zhu Lin was previously familiar with able-bodied tennis, and did not know much about wheelchair technology, in order to let the team members master skills faster, she "turned the edge" everywhere and asked coaches of other teams to teach, "So we go out to play, and we will also specifically ask other team members for wheelchair technology." ”

Completely different from the life wheelchair, the competitive wheelchair turns particularly fast, if the body and the wheelchair do not fully cooperate, wrestling is the norm, "often fall blue and purple". Dong Shunjiang leaned back during a serve exercise, and with a force, he even led the chair backwards, he hit the cervical vertebrae and rested for more than a month. After recovering from his injury, he began to study the endurance and explosiveness of wheelchair training, and he brushed the hand rim with the position of the lifeline of his palm again and again, and slowly began to enjoy the thrill of speed, "I will remember the feeling of running before the injury".

Dong Shunjiang once revealed to the media that when he was young, he had the idea of "becoming a truck driver in the future", when the roads in the village were not good, and it was difficult for people and crops in the mountains to reach farther places, and truck drivers became a profession that "went far and earned more" in the eyes of teenagers. Unexpectedly, the last thing that helped him really reach the distance was tennis: in 2011, Dong Shunjiang participated in the first international tournament and won the men's doubles championship at the Osaka Open in Japan; In 2016, at the Wheelchair Tennis World Cup team competition held in Tokyo, Japan, Dong Shunjiang and his teammates successfully won the men's team championship and won the first World Cup championship of Chinese men's wheelchair tennis.

For Dong Shunjiang, champions are not only honors, but also the courage to pursue bigger dreams. With the help of caring people, Dong Shunjiang went abroad to earn points while studying, and a few years ago, he graduated from the championship class of Beijing Sport University and looked back on his past among the many experiences of competition.

A highly disabled South African wheelchair tennis player impressed him, "Professional tennis players have to rely on themselves for many things, but what is shocking is that a competition wheelchair, a living wheelchair, a tennis bag, so many things, he alone on one hand, running all over the world." Dong Shunjiang said frankly, "My limbs are all good, as a person with such good physical conditions, why can't I do what I should do well?" ”

Previously, due to the epidemic, Dong Shunjiang missed the Tokyo Paralympics due to insufficient points. Most recently, he is competing in points races in Turkey in order to return to the Paris Paralympics next year. He still remembers a men's doubles match at the Rio 2016 Paralympic Games, "I felt that there were four Chinese of me, my partner, the coach, and the team leader, and when we made a mistake, the other party applauded, and many athletes did not dare to fight when they encountered this situation, but I was different, the louder they were, the more focused and tenacious I was." The game was ultimately lost, but Dong Shunjiang and his teammates received applause from the audience, he liked himself like that, "not timid, dare to fight, dare to play".

Zhongqing Daily · Zhongqing Net reporter Liang Xuan Source: China Youth Daily

Source: China Youth Daily