Gymnastics History

If one were to write a list of men’s gymnastics prodigies, Dmitri Bilozerchev would be at the top. But he was not the only gymnast to win a world all-around title at the age of sixteen. China’s Feng Jing achieved the same feat in 2001 and did so under rather unlikely circumstances. With China’s top gymnasts at home preparing for the National Games, Feng was part of a young, second-string squad sent to Ghent. He finished just eighteenth in qualifying and then surprised even himself by walking away as the world all-around champion.

Yet for such a remarkable achievement, Feng Jing has become a surprisingly obscure figure in gymnastics history. His world title did not lead to the Olympic career one might have expected: he was an alternate in 2004, missed the Beijing team in 2008, and retired two years later. The two translations below capture him at opposite ends of that journey. The first, published just after his breakthrough in 2001, introduces a mischievous sixteen-year-old whose winding path through China’s gymnastics system had suddenly ended at the top of the world. The second catches up with him years after retirement, when the former prodigy had happily traded elite gymnastics for what he repeatedly calls an “ordinary life” as a university teacher.

Teng Haibin was supposed to be the future of Chinese gymnastics. In 2003, at just eighteen, he helped China win the world team title and unexpectedly took the pommel horse crown, as well. Coaches called him a “genius” and the future standard-bearer of the national team; what impressed them as much as his talent was an almost unnerving composure under pressure. Teng himself had a simpler formulation: “Steadiness is my form of power.”

What followed was a career that repeatedly tested that steadiness. Teng became Olympic champion at nineteen, but his Athens gold came only days after a disastrous team final in which his own mistakes helped end China’s hopes of defending its title. He then spent the better part of a decade trying to return to the Olympic stage, missing Beijing and coming agonizingly close in London before an injury forced him out at the last moment.

The pieces collected here trace what happened to that quiet teenager once the future everyone predicted for him actually arrived: champion, disappointment, comeback, husband, father, and eventually coach. Enjoy!

Here’s more than you ever wanted to know about Li Xiaopeng. 😜

Then again, few gymnasts have careers that leave quite so much to talk about. From his arrival on the Chinese national team as a teenager to his final Olympic triumph in Beijing, Li spent more than a decade at the center of one of the most successful eras in Chinese men’s gymnastics. Along the way, he became an Olympic champion four times and accumulated an extraordinary collection of medals on vault and parallel bars, while also helping China to some of its greatest team successes.

The translations collected here tell that story from many angles and at many different moments: the gifted and mischievous child, the young star suddenly thrust onto the world stage, the champion wrestling with injuries and disappointment, and the veteran trying to make his way back for one last Olympics. Read together, they offer something more interesting than a conventional career retrospective: a portrait of Li Xiaopeng assembled in real time, as Chinese journalists, coaches, teammates, and Li himself tried to make sense of a career that was still unfolding.

Xiao Junfeng was born in Xi’an but was recruited to compete for Shenzhen in 1990. There was just one problem: the city had a gymnastics team on paper but nowhere for it to train. So Xiao trained instead on Ersha Island in Guangzhou and at intensive camps in Chengdu. A decade later, he stood on the podium in Sydney as part of the Chinese team that won the country’s first Olympic men’s gymnastics team title. Shenzhen had its first Olympic champion—even if its new champion had spent little of his career training there.

The piece translated here appeared in the Shenzhen Special Zone Daily on September 19, 2010—ten years to the day after the congratulatory telegram with which it opens, and weeks after the thirtieth anniversary of the Shenzhen Special Economic Zone. It pairs Xiao’s account of his career with that of Han Xingyuan, who headed the training section of the municipal sports work brigade in those years. Xiao tells the story of becoming an Olympic champion; Han tells the story of the system that acquired him.

Enjoy!

Zhang Jinjing’s career was short but brilliant. Within just a few years, he rose from precocious teenage prospect to world champion and captain of the Chinese men’s team.

Just as quickly, however, it began to unravel. Injuries, disciplinary setbacks, and the relentless emergence of a new generation steadily pushed him out of contention. These translations trace that remarkable arc as it unfolded in the 1990s—from the excitement surrounding a gifted teenager, to the burden of leading one of the world’s strongest teams, to the abrupt end of a career that shone brightly but all too briefly.

Few gymnasts of the 1990s combined technical precision with artistic elegance as successfully as Huang Liping. A world champion on parallel bars in 1994 and a member of China’s gold medal-winning team at the 1994 World Championships, he also helped the Chinese men win the silver medal at the 1996 Olympic Games. Renowned for the beauty of his gymnastics, one Russian expert reportedly described him as the gymnast who most perfectly combined gymnastics and ballet.

The translations collected here follow Huang through the years after his competitive career. They show him reinventing himself as a coach, international judge, and FIG official while remaining deeply committed to Chinese gymnastics. Along the way, they also reveal a quieter, more personal side of Huang: his fascination with computers and golf, his friendship with a devoted Japanese fan, his marriage to former South Korean national team gymnast Heo So-young (허소영), and his reflections on developing the next generation of champions.

Note: Heo’s Chinese name is Xu Xiaoying (许小英). In English, her Korean name is often transliterated as Hu So-young.

Li Jing belonged to one of the strongest generations in Chinese men’s gymnastics, but he never wanted to be known simply as another member of the “Li family.” As the careers of Li Yuejiu, Li Xiaoping, and Li Ning captured international attention, fans often remarked that Li Jing even looked like Li Ning, the legendary “Gymnastics Prince.” His response was characteristically direct: “I am who I am—a lively, stubborn son of Hunan.”

That independent spirit defined both his personality and his gymnastics. A six-time world champion and three-time Olympic silver medalist, Li built his reputation on extraordinary difficulty and originality. Chinese writers of the era described his name as virtually synonymous with high-difficulty gymnastics, pointing to the remarkable range of difficult elements and combinations he introduced into his routines soon after joining the national team. Several of those combinations—especially on horizontal bar and parallel bars—were regarded by contemporaries as among the most demanding ever attempted, even if they were never adopted into the Code of Points as eponymous skills.

Yet Li’s career was far from inevitable. Born into a poor family in Hengyang, he nearly abandoned gymnastics after experts concluded that his small hands and short fingers made him unsuited for the sport. Only the persistence of his first coach, Zhou Xin, who convinced him to return to training and build on his exceptional upper-body strength and aptitude for release skills, kept his dream alive. Years of training barefoot in an unheated gym, falling repeatedly from homemade apparatus, and refusing to give up transformed the frail boy who once hung a homemade “World Champion” medallion around his neck into one of China’s greatest gymnasts.