In the 2008 Wenchuan earthquake, the parents of a boy were both killed and he lost a leg. Waking up from his hospital bed, he was surrounded by great grief and remained silent all day.
The doctor heard that the boy loved table tennis, so he tried to open his heart: "If the table tennis world champion came to play with you, would you be happier?" ”
The boy shook his head: "They won't be here, you lied to me." ”
Unexpectedly, the doctor actually found deng Yaping, the "ping-pong queen".
Deng Yaping recently took a photo
After the meeting, Deng Yaping communicated and played with the boy, and before leaving, she gave the boy a deep hug, and the boy's body trembled with excitement.
After she left, the boy cried bitterly, and the backlog of emotions in his heart was finally released, and the doctor said that this was the beginning of the improvement.
For Deng Yaping, helping and supporting such a child with sports dreams is her mission and responsibility.
Because she was also a girl who came out of a small town, because she had a big dream, from an ordinary girl to a world champion, from a Cambridge doctor to an official, an entrepreneur, a philanthropist...
Deng Yaping changed her identities and was at ease. How hard she tries, how wonderful her life is.
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Deng Yaping was born in 1973 in Zhengzhou, Henan Province. His mother was a textile worker, and his father was a table tennis singles champion in the five provinces of Central and Southern China, and after retiring from the army, he stayed in Henan Province as a sports coach.
Under the influence of her father, Deng Yaping began to learn to play table tennis at the age of 5. At that time, she was not as high as the table, and she had to put a wooden box under her feet to get it. In this way, the weak Deng Yaping tiptoed and started her table tennis career.
Young Deng Yaping
When she first came into contact with table tennis, Deng Yaping felt that it was endlessly fun. Sometimes on rainy days, her father wouldn't let her go out to practice, but she said she would go anyway. The other child was crying for toys, she was crying to play ball.
Her father had a unique training method, and Deng Yaping also learned very seriously. At the age of 8, she was able to beat most of her peers. At the age of 9, she won the women's singles title at the National Amateur Table Tennis Championships and qualified for the provincial team.
However, this is by no means a story of a talented girl lying down to win, and Deng Yaping's road to the championship has not been smooth.
In 1982, Deng Yaping finally entered the provincial team training and began her career as a professional player. But just half a month into the provincial team, the coach let her father take her home, because Deng Yaping is small, the coach feels that she has no cultivation value.
When she got home, her father told her in a serious tone: If she agrees with the coach, stop training. If you don't agree, try to prove yourself.
Faced with the first choice in her life, Deng Yaping, who was only 9 years old, did not know what this meant, she just felt that she had to fight for breath: "Unconvinced!" I can beat them! ”
After that, she transferred to the Zhengzhou city team and began to double down on hard training. The training conditions were harsh, and the abandoned bathhouse had four tables, which became a training room, and the players slept in the men's and women's locker rooms at night.
Even so, Deng Yaping insisted on training for more than 10 hours a day, hitting the ball tens of thousands of times, and never stopped 365 days a year. Table tennis pays attention to winning with speed, in order to improve the speed of hitting, Deng Yaping tied 30 pounds of sandbags to her body when training. When the sandbag was unloaded after the practice, the whole body was as light as a swallow, and the wind was under his feet when he ran.
In four years, Deng Yaping's skills have become more and more skilled, and she has won two championships in one go in the junior competition, which makes people have to look at her with admiration. The provincial team, which had turned her away, had sought out her coach twice before seconding Deng Yaping back.
In 1986, at the age of 13, Deng Yaping won the national championship for the provincial team. This game also made the national team coach Zhang Xielin notice this small player.
This time, however, Deng Yaping was turned away again — again because of her height.
Of the five coaches in the national team, 4 voted against it. In the end, zhang Xielin led her to the national team: "Being short is her advantage, because she sees that any ball is tall and can attack for her." ”
Player period
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This time, fate was on Deng Yaping's side.
After entering the national team, facing teammates who are older than herself, taller and more technical, Deng Yaping is not discouraged, but she is more cruel to herself.
Every day she trains, she practices 40 minutes more than others, and at the end of the year, she practices 40 more days. In the day-to-day training, Deng Yaping figured out a new set of playing styles suitable for herself, which was accurately summarized by the commentators as "playing fiercely, fast and changeable".
At the 1989 World Table Tennis Championships, 16-year-old Deng Yaping played for the country for the first time and won the women's doubles championship with her partner Qiao Hong.
At the 1991 World Table Tennis Championships, Deng Yaping won the women's singles championship for the first time.
And this is just the beginning, since then, Deng Yaping has won almost all the gold medals in the World Series, with brilliant and invincible results.
In her 9-year national team career, Deng Yaping won 18 world championships, 4 Olympic gold medals, ranked first in the world for 8 consecutive years in the table tennis world, ruled the world women's table tennis for nearly 10 years, and created her own "Deng Yaping era".
In 1997, the 24-year-old Deng Yaping gradually faded out of the game, and she was plagued by injuries, and it was time for her to retire.
An era is over, she put down her former glory, packed up all the gold medal trophies, and turned this chapter of her life.
Gold Medal Harvester
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Former IOC President Samaranch once told Deng Yaping: "The world has opened its doors to you because you have this key." This time, Samaranch became another nobleman in Deng Yaping's life, and under his recommendation, Deng Yaping entered the International Olympic Committee after retiring.
The first time she went to the Olympic Committee for a meeting, Deng Yaping found that she was the only one in the audience with an interpreter. Throughout the whole session, she couldn't understand anything, she relied on the translation to tell her every word, and she felt like an outsider by doing everything slower than others.
Deng Yaping was determined to learn English well and break the stereotypical influence of sports people's "developed limbs and simple minds", so she opened her 11-year-long path of study.
On the road to study, Deng Yaping suffered no less than when she played table tennis.
When she was a child, she mainly trained, and her homework was very poor. When she entered the Department of Foreign Languages at Tsinghua University, she could not even write 26 English letters. But Deng Yaping firmly believes that as long as you work harder than others, you will definitely win. 14 hours of hard work every day has allowed her English to soar from zero to professional level.
Get a degree in foreign languages
In 2001, deng Yaping, as the ambassador of Beijing's Olympic bid, made an exposition report in fluent English at the scene, contributing to Beijing's victory in the right to host the 2008 Olympic Games.
After graduating from Tsinghua University, Deng Yaping went to the United Kingdom and obtained a master's degree from the University of Nottingham. But she was not satisfied, and she planned to go to Cambridge University to pursue a doctorate.
Before entering Cambridge, Deng Yaping needed a letter of recommendation, and the tutor advised her to find Samaranch. For her request, Samaranch initially refused: "Why are you studying for a Doctorate?" After completing your master's degree, you will return to China and work for Chinese people. ”
"I will definitely go back, but Cambridge is my dream and I believe that after graduating from Cambridge I can do more for Chinese."
A few years later, Deng Yaping successfully obtained a doctorate from cambridge university, becoming the first Olympic champion in Cambridge to receive a doctorate in 800 years.
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As I said to Samaranch before, after graduating with a doctorate, Deng Yaping returned to her motherland for the first time.
After returning to China, she joined the People's Daily, then served as the secretary of the Municipal Committee of the Beijing Municipal Communist Youth League, and then took the helm of the People's Network to establish the "Instant Search", and her identity changed several times, and she never left the national framework.
In 2016, the 43-year-old Deng Yaping returned to her hometown of Zhengzhou and established a sports industry investment fund to devote herself to the sports industry and sports public welfare undertakings.
The beginning of Deng Yaping's public welfare road began with the "pairing" activity in the national team decades ago.
At that time, the national team helped children in poor areas through "pairing", and Deng Yaping sponsored a girl from Henan County. The girl came to the national team to experience the days of life, eating only vegetables and not eating meat, Deng Yaping asked to know that the girl could not eat meat, because she had not eaten before.
In the same province, the gap between rural and urban children is so large, which makes Deng Yaping feel the impact in her heart, and since then she has begun to pay attention to the vulnerable groups. After becoming famous, she felt that she had received a lot of help and should continue to pass on this love.
Coaching young players
After the 1992 Olympics, Deng Yaping donated all 50,000 prizes to the Red Cross Society of Henan Province, and with her help, hundreds of out-of-school children were able to return to school. Like "Pairing Up" in those days, she invited a rural girl to visit Beijing, took her shopping, took her to eat delicious food, and took her to her own training center. The girl said it was a place she had only seen in her dreams, and she had only been to the county town with asphalt roads at most. Since then, the girl has planted a dream in her heart, she said that she wants to build her hometown like Beijing in the future.
In 1996, Deng Yaping once again took out 50,000 yuan from the Olympic prize money and donated it to a hope primary school in Shanxi to help children in poor mountainous areas and improve the school environment.
After retiring, as the chairman of China's Top Ten Champions Committee, Deng Yaping led the retired champions to visit various places and carried out the "Dandelion Plan" for peasant children, the "Light of the Heart" program for disabled teenagers, the "Hand in Hand Tomorrow Plan" for runaway teenagers, and the "Bright Walk" for poor students to restore their eyesight.
She also co-launched the "Planet Project" with the China Women's Development Foundation, which specifically visits poor areas with poor physical education resources, looking for children with sports ideals and athletic talents to help them realize their sports dreams.
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In 2004, Deng Yaping married former national team table tennis player Lin Zhigang in a low-key manner, and two years later gave birth to a son, Lin Hanming, and the family of three had a happy and harmonious life. Perhaps inheriting his mother's excellent genes, Lin Hanming, who was just 15 years old this year, is already a player in the Beijing men's table tennis team, and in last year's youth championships, he achieved a good result of men's singles championship and team runner-up, and the future is promising.
Deng Yaping, now 48 years old, is still "tossing and turning". In addition to family and career, she devotes about 40% of her time to charity, often traveling to various cities, doing public welfare activities, promoting national fitness, and is committed to mobilizing more people to participate in sports and public welfare.
In the digital age, Deng Yaping is also increasingly involved in online public welfare. Even participating in variety shows has become a way for her to spread public welfare, using the power of example to ignite the light and heat in the lives of more people.
"Life is very short, and it's not easy to do something meaningful." Deng Yaping has long regarded the sports industry and sports public welfare as a lifelong cause. As she said, she lives and is also doing public welfare.