Some say there are only three diving geniuses in the world — the American Loganis, the Russian Sauddin and the Chinese Sun Shuwei. Sun Shuwei won the national championship at the age of 13, the Asian championship at the age of 14, and the world championship at the age of 15. The Olympic champion was the culmination of a professional athlete's splendor, reaching that culmination when he was only 16 years old.
Young to fame
He won the Olympic championship at the age of 16
In 1992, 16-year-old Sun Shuwei was 1.42 meters tall and weighed 35 kilograms. Sun Shuwei said that his main opponent at the Barcelona Olympics was Sauddin, in fact, teammate Xiong Ni was his real opponent, xiong Ni was 18 years old, two years older than Sun Shuwei. Xiong Ni and Sun Shuwei finished first and second respectively in the men's 10m platform preliminaries, and on the night before the final, two people who were friends and opponents slept in a house, and both of them turned over and couldn't sleep.
In the final, Xiong Ni did not play well enough, and the ranking once retreated to 7th place. Sun Shuwei's last jump choice was reflexively flipping for three and a half weeks and holding his knees, with a difficulty factor of 3.4, which was the most difficult action in the world at that time. When 16-year-old Sun Shuwei reflexively jumped off the high platform, people's eyes could not even keep up with his dazzling movements.
This almost perfect jump, so that the four referees invariably showed 10 points, according to the scoring rules of the diving competition, remove a maximum score of 10 points, remove a minimum score of 9.0 points, the remaining 5 referees scored by 5, to get the average score, multiplied by 3, and then multiplied by the difficulty coefficient of 3.4, Sun Shuwei's final jump score of 99.960 points, which is a rare high score in the international diving community so far.
From the lounge to the podium set up by the plunge pool, Sun Shuwei also asked herself to walk perfectly. Of the three athletes who will receive the award, only Sun Shuwei is wearing a neatly dressed award-receiving uniform. This dark and thin child became the "dark horse prince" in the minds of everyone, and also let people remember his name.
Sudden eye disease
Continue diving in a different way
As she stepped off the podium of the Olympic champion, 16-year-old Sun Shuwei began to look forward to the next Olympic Games, but he never appeared on the Olympic field again.
In 1996, when the Atlanta Olympics arrived, Sun Shuwei was just 20 years old, the golden age of a professional athlete, but the injury kept the diving genius out of the threshold of the Olympic Games.
In 1993, Sun Shuwei was found to have "retinal perforation" in his left eye during a physical examination and had to undergo cryosurgery on the retina. In 1996, before the Olympic Trials, Sun Shuwei once again underwent cryotherapy on the retina during a training session due to a tear around the retina in his right eye. "It took two months off to resume training and then to participate in the trials. As a result, the total scores of the two games combined, I jumped third. According to the regulations, only the top two can participate in the Olympic Games, and Sun Shuwei, who jumped third, can only watch his teammates go out with regret.
Sun Shuwei said that if it were not for the eye injury, his state at that time was actually good. When he won the World Cup in 1995, he won the second place by 50 points. That's a big gap for diving.
After the 2001 Nine Games, Sun Shuwei chose to retire and faded from people's sight. A few years later, when Sun Shuwei reappeared in front of a pool of clear water, he had become a diving coach. When it comes to the difference between being a coach and being an athlete, Sun Shuwei feels that these are two completely different feelings. "When you are an athlete, you think about it relatively simply, how to dance the action well, is the goal. As a coach, I must think more and more carefully, such as how to think about how to integrate my ideas into my usual training, how to let the players understand my training intentions, and how to help the team members further improve the level of action. This is not an easy task, much more complicated than when you were an athlete. ”