Her dad would help her practice (walking on a single straight line) on sidewalks on the way home from school.
When she left Huangshi at seven to go to the provincial sports
school, she would cry randomly during training because she misses home.
It was a hard time for her because the school’s tuition was 1000 a
month, but her family only earns 300 a month. Her coach (Coach Zhao
Hanhua) and another male
coach was pitching in for her tuition because
they didn’t want her talent to go to waste. She was improving so quickly
that her coach wrote a report to the school administrators regarding
her potential, and from there on, she was given a full ride scholarship.
She was never an ambitious person even after entering the National
team. She talks about going up to introduce herself to the team like
everyone else and because everyone was saying “I want to be a
world/olympic Champion”, she ended up saying the same thing, but at the
time, she thought, “lol, I’d be happy to just be a national champion
sometime”.
It was in 2003 that she suddenly asked herself what she wanted out of
life and started seriously striving to be on the world stage.
She talked about how difficult the pressure leading up to the
Olympics was for her (“People expect me to win, but the more you win,
there are more things in your heart and it weighs you down”), and how
difficult it was to try and come back.
She talked about her injury 42 days before the London Olympics and
said “In that moment I was relieved because it was over. Everything, the
good and the bad, it came to an end."
She made a decision in May 2013 to go back to Wuhan and teach
gymnastics, because a friend of her’s said "A sport like gymnastics, if
an athlete who actually competed, like you, won’t go and teach and
popularize it, then it’s impossible for someone else to do it better.”
No comments:
Post a Comment