On an ordinary night in February 1983, a cry was heard in a hospital in Changsha, Hunan Province. In the delivery room, 40-year-old Cheng Yunyan finally gave birth to her and her husband Bao Changan's third child - a lovely baby boy.
Looking at his son's wrinkled little face, the exhausted Cheng Yunyan's eyes were full of tears and joy.
Cheng Yunyan and Bao Changan are ordinary employees of the two state-owned enterprises, and their salaries are not high. Although life is passable, it is definitely not easy to talk about abundance. In particular, the cost of raising three children is greater, and family expenses are further strained.
Xiao Bao Chunlai was born very naughty, and he couldn't be at peace when he climbed up and down. His grandparents and parents were busy with work and had no time to take care of them, so he had to run around at home by himself.
Perhaps it was this wild growth environment that gave him a natural talent for sports.
When he was 8 years old, the coach of Changsha Badminton School entered Bao Chunlai's school and fell in love with him at a glance among many troublemaker-like children. The coach saw that Koharu's instinct to run and jump as he pleased, far from being ordinary, but extremely high motor nerves and agility.
So he did not hesitate to select him into the city badminton team and began to receive professional training.
The Bao family, who is poor, is naturally reluctant to send their baby son to a sports school. But Cheng Yunyan understands that this is a great opportunity to change his son's life, even if the family is very poor, he must seize it.
Since then, she has been riding a battered bicycle every day, and taking time out of her working hours to pick up and drop off her son for training at Changsha Badminton School. Looking at her mother, whose knees were a little weak when riding, Koharu came to be much more sensible and no longer dared to be naughty and mischievous like before.
In the four years of training of the Changsha badminton team, Bao Chunlai worked hard and soon became a seeded player valued by coaches. He has outstanding physical condition, quick reflexes, solid basic skills, and has won consecutive matches in the same age group, and his technical level has improved by leaps and bounds.
In 1994, 11-year-old Bao Chunlai finally waited for the first turning point in his life. Under the strong recommendation of the coach, he successfully passed the selection and became a member of the Hunan Provincial Badminton Team.
This is undoubtedly the dream opportunity of every badminton player. Overnight, Bao Chunlai changed from a young player of the city team to a "provincial team athlete" in the formal sense.
The training intensity of the provincial team is very different from that of the municipal team. Strict coaching and organizational discipline often make Bao Chunlai feel unbearable. But every time he thinks about the mother who even wore her knees to take her to training, he feels a sense of strength in his heart.
So the young Bao Chunlai gritted his teeth and persevered, and in the four years of the provincial team, his badminton skills and physical fitness have made great progress.
In 1998, 15-year-old Bao Chunlai finally entered the national youth team through layers of competition. This means that he has officially stood out as the best player in the domestic peer group.
More intense training, more rigorous competition, and more frequent international exchange competitions have become the norm in his life. However, Bao Chunlai never flinched. In 2000, at the age of 17, he won the men's singles championship at the World Youth Championships and became famous! At the same time, he also won the men's team championship for the Chinese team at the Asian Youth Championships.
Bao Chunlai, who won the World Youth Championships, was finally selected for the national team at the age of 18. This is the pinnacle of his badminton career. What makes him even happier is that he was selected with a Fujian friend born in the same year - Lin Dan.
The two were placed in the same dormitory, and soon became friends and rivals.
In 2004, 21-year-old Bao Chunlai, who was still playing for the national team at the time, had a relationship with a female athlete named Luo Xuejuan who was disclosed by the media. In an instant, the two became a pair of "golden boys and girls" in the sports world.
Luo Xuejuan is a female athlete on the Chinese swimming team, born in Hangzhou in 1985. In 2003, she won the 50-meter breaststroke, 100-meter breaststroke and 4x100-meter medley in the competition, and the media and fans affectionately called her the "Queen of Frogs".
Bao Chunlai and Luo Xuejuan are both born in the 80s, only 1 year old. Both of them have worked hard since childhood, and finally successfully entered the top players of their respective national teams when they were teenagers.
Perhaps because they have experienced the hardships and joys of hard training, they met and got to know each other in the training camp of the national team, and their friendship was sublimated into love, and this relationship has also won the blessing of the public.
However, the good times did not last long, and the road of love was full of thorns and bumps. Just a year later, the relationship between the two ended in a breakup. At that time, the outside world speculated that the reason was that there was a gap between the two people's respective athletic achievements, especially Luo Xuejuan won the gold medal in the breaststroke event at the 2004 Athens Olympics, becoming the banner of women's swimming and China's public lover, and her fame obviously surpassed that of Bao Chunlai, who was in a trough at that time; This may have eventually led to the parting of ways between the two on the road of relationship.
To this day, even after many years of retirement, Bao Chunlai remains single. Does he have palpitations and still hasn't been able to get out of that youthful memory? Does he often think of the petite girl who used to be close to his heart? We don't know.
However, this legendary love affair has become a beautiful legend with mixed reputations in the sports world and even the entire entertainment industry.
In the years after breaking up with the "Frog Queen" Luo Xuejuan, Bao Chunlai still played an important role in the national badminton team. Although he has not been able to break the curse of "second millennium" in many major competitions, and has repeatedly lost to his old rival Lin Dan in the finals, his strength and stability still rely on the Chinese team.
Unlike his friend Lin Dan, Bao Chunlai is not good at breaking out in the tiebreaker. His style is more consistent and he is good at controlling the tempo. Therefore, in many team competitions, he was able to win a valuable point for the Chinese team.
After competing at the 2008 Beijing Olympics, the 29-year-old has been representing the national team for many years.
In 2011, he finally decided to retire from the official competition of the International Badminton Federation and focus more on commercial competitions and youth development. The timing of choosing to retire is timely, because in the past two years, a group of post-90s rookies with world championship potential have emerged in the Chinese team, making Bao Chunlai, a post-80s generation, gradually lose his position in the team.
After officially announcing his retirement, the 28-year-old Bao Chunlai made a decisive transformation and devoted more energy to his acting career. His muscular figure and Sven temperament are very popular in the graphic modeling industry.
By chance, he also played the leading role in several youth idol dramas and contributed his voice to many film and television theme songs. Although his acting skills are immature, his outstanding appearance and status as a blue-chip athlete have made him famous in the entertainment industry, with hundreds of thousands of fans.
In 2016, he also won the title of "Best Crossover Male God of the Year" with this series of crossover works.
Looking back on Bao Chunlai's life, it is not difficult for us to find that excellent talent and family background do not represent the ultimate achievement. Bao Chunlai and Lin Dan, who also have amazing physical conditions and sports cells, have very different achievements in the badminton arena in the end.
Among them, the acquired effort and psychological quality have a far-reaching impact.
Lin Dan grew up in a military family, and his bones flowed with the courage and blood to move forward. Bao Chunlai, who grew up in an ordinary family, is shy and introverted, and is often indecisive in match point conversion, which may be the fundamental reason why he lost to Lin Dan in many major tournament tiebreakers.
The environment in which life grows up can deeply affect a person's character. Regardless of talent, hard work and perseverance are the keys to determining fate. Although Bao Chunlai has been defeated repeatedly on the court, the delicacy and elegance of his personality have also made him unique in the entertainment industry.
We also see from Bao Chunlai's emotional road that success and achievement cannot make up for the attachment to love.
Life will eventually return to the heart, to those original simplicity and sincerity. We are all working our own stages of life, and we are all experiencing different joys and pains.
The imprint of those youthful years will forever remind our hearts of what is love and what is willing in this life.