On March 12, the State General Administration of Sport published a series of cadre adjustments on its website. One of the cadre adjustments, dated December 22, 2020, shows that Wang Yifu, a member of the Expert Committee of the Chinese Olympic Committee and a famous hero of Chinese shooting sports, has retired at an old age.
Born in 1960, Wang Yifu was a professional shooter. From 1984 to 2004, he participated in the Olympic Games for six consecutive times, and was the athlete with the most Participation in the Olympic Games in China, known as the "Elder of the Six Dynasties". In addition, when Wang Yifu won the Olympics in Athens in 2004, he was 44 years old, and he was also the oldest Olympic champion in China.
At the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics, Wang Yifu participated in the Olympic Games for the first time to participate in the 50-meter pistol slow shooting, but the brightest star of the Chinese team participating in the first olympic games was his teammate Xu Haifeng, who won the gold medal in the event, the first gold medal in China's Olympic history, and Wang Yifu won the bronze medal. At the 1992 Barcelona Olympics, Wang Yifu won his first Olympic gold medal in the men's 10m air pistol competition. However, at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, Wang Yifu, who was trying to defend his title, fainted due to physical weakness in the final and finally won a silver medal, and the picture of him lying on a stretcher with an oxygen mask was painful to see.
At the 2000 Sydney Olympics, Wang Yifu was second with a difference of two rings, but at the 2004 Athens Olympic Games, Wang Yifu once again won the gold medal in the 10-meter air pistol. Wang Yifu has participated in 6 Olympic Games and won 2 gold, 2 silver and 1 bronze, there is no doubt that his athlete career is incomparably brilliant, but interestingly, in a program of Deng Yaping's dialogue with Xu Haifeng, Xu Haifeng once said, "If I let me select athletes, first of all, we may sift from the personality, because there are more athletes who shoot introverts." Wang Yifu from the beginning of training to the first world champion, do you know how many years he worked? His first world champion was in 1990, he was an athlete in 1977, I was 2 years old and he was 13 years old. So my personality is suitable for shooting, and his extroverted personality is not suitable for shooting, so he needs to spend a little more time than others. ”
In 2005, Wang Yifu retired from the army and served as the head coach of the national shooting team and the coach of the pistol team, and since then he has been elected vice president of the International Shooting Federation, and he is also known as the "godfather of Chinese shooting". In 2017, the Chinese Olympic Committee officially established an expert committee, and Wang Yifu also became an expert member of the Chinese Olympic Committee. Wang Yifu trained two outstanding disciples, Du Li and Pang Wei, Who did not live up to Wang Yifu's trust, both of them won Olympic championships, and the two of them were married under the mediation of Wang Yifu, becoming the first Olympic champion couple in Chinese history.
Although at the Los Angeles Olympics, Wang Yifu failed to become the person who made history, it was precisely because of that Olympic Games that Wang Yifu gained love. In 1983, during the training of the national shooting team to prepare for the Olympic Games, Wang Yifu met his teammate Zhang Qiuping, and once comforted Zhang Qiuping, who failed to qualify for the Olympic Games, let the love between the two germinate. In 1987, Wang Yifu and Zhang Qiuping entered the marriage hall, and the two ushered in the birth of their daughter in 1991, named Wang Weixuan.
Today, Zhang Qiuping continues to cultivate talents for the national team as the head coach of the Tsinghua shooting team, while Wang Weixuan has also been selected for the national shooting team and won the women's 10m air rifle youth team championship at the 2007 Asian Championships. However, Wang Weixuan, who graduated from Tsinghua University, has now given up professional shooting and instead served as the head of national defense education in the Armed Forces Department of the Party Committee of Tsinghua University. I have to say that over the years, Wang Yifu and his family have made outstanding contributions to Chinese shooting in many fields, and the name of "The Godfather of Chinese Shooting" is well deserved!