If there really is a spiritual award called "The Old Lady and the Sea", I am willing to nominate all the brave female athletes of this Olympic Games. In the brutal stadium, their ambition, strength, perseverance, and fighting are at a glance, and the dream of belonging to women's competition comes true in front of the audience.
▲ "Young Woman and the Sea", which tells the story of the first female athlete who swam across the English Channel, has been translated by netizens as "The Old Lady and the Sea", which directly refers to the fearless spirit of women in the face of natural competition. Left picture/Weibo @Roland Garros-French Open, right picture/Weibo @CCTV Sports
Chen Yiwen, who won the women's doubles springboard championship at the age of 25, took 16 years to walk on the Olympic podium. She started diving at the age of 9, which is much later than the girls who started diving at the age of five or six.
She didn't flinch or hesitate. On this road, she is challenging her own extreme, and she is also using her own experience to write another story of "late bloomer".
▲ Weibo @CCTV News
She loves to play with film cameras, teaches herself English, and is not literary and artistic outside of the sporting event of diving. In her, you will find that art and competition can be combined. This girl with "boyish" short hair and fierce competition with opponents on the stadium may not be able to become a "soft diving queen".
▲ Chen Yiwen's life photos, picture/Chen Yiwen's Weibo, INS account @cyw615
There are really too many glamorous women at this Paris Olympics.
Deng Yawen, who "can fly on a bicycle", won the first gold medal in the women's BMX freestyle event for China, and the women's rugby team upset into the top six.
▲ Zuo Deng Yawen in the freestyle BMX race, photo/Olympic live broadcast; Right women's six-a-side rugby match, photo/Weibo @CCTV Sports
In the past, East Asian girls were rarely willing to reveal their ambitions, and their expressions of certain desires often attracted criticism for them. However, now, the flamboyance and "murderous spirit" displayed by the female players have obviously become a reason for people to praise them.
Facing the "Great Devil" and Poland's star Swiatek, who has defeated him six times, 21-year-old tennis player Zheng Qinwen did not back down. With amazing patience and perseverance, she fought against her fierce opponent in the semi-finals for 3 hours in the hot outdoors, and finally managed to turn the tables against the wind, and then rushed to the finals to win the gold medal, which explained what it means to be an exciting game. Until then, it was hard to imagine that an East Asian woman would win an Olympic tennis title.
▲ Zheng Qinwen defeated Swiatek to win the game, picture/Olympic live broadcast
Foreign media said that Zheng Qinwen did something almost impossible to do. They were surprised that only two months ago, the tennis player who had frequently lost at the Australian Open and the French Open could beat the world No. 1. But if you look back at her growth, they will find that the seeds of ambition have been planted long ago.
Compared with Li Na, Zheng Qinwen's upbringing environment is completely different. She is not like a group of "athletes in the system" such as Quan Hongchan, Sun Yingsha, and Li Meng, and the training fee is fully funded by the state. Zheng Qinwen has always been a family-style training, and the training, living, and competition expenses in his early years were basically at his own expense.
Professional tennis is a very money-burning sport, and almost all of the top players in this sport are abroad, which also means that in order to allow Zheng Qinwen to adapt to international competitions, get more high-value competition experience, and practice more top-notch skills, the family often has to face the problems of "survival" and "progress"; On the one hand, it is necessary to hire a higher-level coaching team and logistics support team, and on the other hand, it is a huge economic pressure.
▲ Zheng Qinwen conducts home training, picture/Weibo @郑Qin文
In the face of such pressure, it is difficult for even middle-class families to persevere. However, for the sake of their daughter's future, or for the "ambition to win gold", her parents paid almost without hesitation. Her mother accompanied her around the world, and at the most difficult time, her father sold his property at one point.
Such hardship and hard work have become the foundation of Zheng Qinwen's willpower. Her coach once said that Zheng Qinwen tried not drinking drinks for a year, did not wear nail polish until he was 20, and ate chicken breast and broccoli 360 days a year. Once the coach wanted to buy her a popsicle, Zheng Qinwen endured it, but still didn't ask for it. For so many years, she and her parents have hardly celebrated the New Year and holidays together, and the most common place for the family to meet is the airport, and after a hug, they are about to leave for the next competition.
▲ Chen Qinwen mentioned that his father had sold a house for his own training, picture/Weibo @ Outside the editorial department
Zheng Qinwen has always dared to speak up and think, and she said before the final: "I really want to win a gold medal for China." "From a young age, her coaches have seen a sharp edge in her.
If Trudy, who "doesn't want to lose" in "Swimmer's Heart", swims across the English Channel, allowing women to prove their strength; Then Zheng Qinwen used a desperate situation to interpret her own "old lady and the sea". An East Asian girl is not favored in the tennis world, and the hard work of a family for half a lifetime makes her not want to lose.
She often faces the camera with no face to the sky, making the audience love to admire a "primitive" woman like her. She doesn't need makeup or shade on the court, after all, her ambition and enthusiasm are already the best decorations.
▲After the game, someone talked about Zheng Qinwen's former nickname of "Queen Wen" and asked her if she felt that she had become a real Queen on the court now, and she said: "I really feel that I deserve it." Photo/Live broadcast of the Olympic Games
Another girl who conquered Paris was Yang Siqi, a 15-year-old girl from Liangshan. As the only Chinese surfing team player to go out of the Paris Olympics, the story she told about "the old lady and the sea" is about courage and the upward struggle of grassroots women.
Surfing is a very dangerous extreme sport that requires extremely mature technical experience to ensure safety. Many of the top athletes have had plenty of exposure to the ocean since childhood. And Yang Siqi was born in Liangshan Prefecture, Sichuan. The town of Yimen, where she lives, was not officially lifted out of poverty until November 2020, and there is no sea there. Before the age of 9, she had never met Azure, and she was told that the sea was salty, but she didn't believe it. It wasn't until she began to touch the sea that she realized that it was a world she had never imagined.
Due to the late start, insufficient training conditions, and the short time that surfing was introduced to China, Yang Siqi, who stood out in the qualifying round and had the opportunity to participate in the Olympics, was once regarded as a "weak competitor", after all, she had never experienced the waves of Tahiti, and had no mature experience.
▲ IC photo
However, she not only showed absolute heroism, but also amazed audiences at home and abroad. On August 2, in the third round of the competition, Yang Siqi faced world champion Caroline Marks, although she finally lost to her opponent and stopped in the top 16 of women's surfing, but foreign sports commentators who watched the competition did not hesitate to praise her as an "absolute warrior".
Faced with the rough waves of Tahiti and the sharp reefs beneath the sea, she was the first to jump into the sea. In order to fight for bigger waves and better scores, she was photographed by the waves again and again, and swam towards the bigger waves again and again. In the second round of the women's surfing competition, she successfully turned the tables with this indomitable attitude.
▲ Live broadcast of the Olympic Games
This little girl wearing a red helmet is not just "catching the waves"? She is also clinging to life's opportunities. No one likes to lose, but in the face of world champions with better surfing training conditions and more experience, all she can do is "catch", grasp the change, and grab the score. From a mountain girl to an Olympic racer, she is conquering the big waves, and she is also reversing the past.
Just as in the movie "Soul Surfer", Bethany, a professional surfer who was bitten off by a shark and lost an arm, once responded to her family's concerns about her return to the sea, saying: "I don't need easy, I need possibility".
▲ Movie "Soul Surfer"
The post-00s girls are fighting, and this "elderly" female athlete has also broadened the imagination of many people. In the past, one could imagine 50+ year old women performing on stage, but few people would ask: why don't they hit the arena?
61-year-old Ni Xialian and 58-year-old Zeng Zhiying really hit this time. In fact, there has never been a limit to the age of athletes in Olympic competitions, but given the decline in physical strength and endurance, the advantage of older athletes to win gold has been greatly reduced, so too many older athletes have actively or passively chosen to retire – even before the age of 30.
▲ Weibo @CCTV Sports
And this time in Paris, the two oldest women in the women's table tennis event showed the audience the courage of "the sword is not old". They don't want to win, they just want to stand on the Olympic stage and fight heartily. For women who love sports, age really isn't an issue.
Table tennis player Zeng Zhiying, 58, who represents Chile, once put down her racket for a long time. In 1983, at the age of 16, she was selected for the Chinese national team. However, the 1986 Olympics introduced a new "two-color rule", which means that the two sides of the racket must be different colors and cannot both be black. The news was like a downpour. You must know that the front and back of early Chinese rackets were basically black, and the black long rubber and anti-arc glue were like magic, which could confuse the opponent and make it difficult for the opponent to judge the rotation and power of the ball.
▲ Live broadcast of the Olympic Games
This change had a great impact on Zeng Zhiying's style of play, and it was difficult for her to adapt in the short term. Later, she transitioned to coaching, was invited to Chile to teach students to play table tennis, and worked as a businessman.
Zeng Zhiying regained her identity as an athlete after many years of her husband and son, and she discovered that her son had a serious "video game addiction". So, she picked up the racket again and taught the child to play, hoping to distract the child through sports. Such a dozen reminded her of her Olympic dream 40 years ago. She started trying to get fit and sign up for the Olympics.
She was eliminated early, but she has long said that even if this Olympic journey is short-lived, becoming an Olympian is the best response to the dream of 40 years ago, and it is more important than winning a medal. After playing for a long time, the muscles of the 50-year-old body will hurt, but her spirit, her skills, and her love have not been lost.
25 years old, 40 years old, 61 years old, women are "in time" at every stage. In competitive sports, the story of ambition and power is never a thin history, but only a narrative. They may have broken through prejudices, or they may have proven their efforts, regardless of status, race, or age.
No matter which version of "The Old Lady and the Sea", they are really saying that the girl can do it.