By the spring of 1999, Meng Fei had established herself as one of China’s leading all-around gymnasts. Although often overshadowed by higher-profile teammates such as LiuXuan and Kui Yuanyuan, she had helped China to silver at the 1995 World Championships and bronze in 1997, earned the 1997 World Championship silver medal on uneven bars, and won the all-around title at the 1997 Chinese National Games. This profile, published just months before the World Championships in Tianjin, gave English speakers a rare peek at life inside the Chinese national team.
Funny, outspoken, and occasionally irreverent, Meng discusses everything from exhausting training and unequal treatment of the women’s team to dancing in the dormitory with teammate Bi Wenjing. Enjoy this article from the archives!
The following chapter is drawn from Xuanmu (璇木), the autobiography of Olympic champion Liu Xuan, published in 2012. Written more than a decade after her retirement, the memoir combines recollections of her competitive career with reflections on the lessons she drew from sport.
In this chapter, Liu recounts the balance beam final at the 2000 Sydney Olympics, the last competition of her career and the performance that earned her Olympic gold. She describes the immense pressure surrounding the event, China’s pursuit of its gymnastics medal targets, and her struggle to compete through a painful back injury. Looking back from the vantage point of adulthood, she presents the competition not merely as an athletic achievement but as a lesson in composure, self-mastery, and finding balance amid uncertainty.
The chapter also contains an interesting historical detail: Liu explains that she did not learn she had been elevated to the Olympic all-around bronze medal until the day after the beam final, when she was informed that Romania’s Andreea Răducan had been disqualified following a positive doping test. Even while acknowledging her own gain, Liu expresses sympathy for Răducan, reflecting on the sacrifices and hardships shared by elite gymnasts regardless of nationality.
For more than a decade after her accident at the 1998 Goodwill Games, Sang Lan occupied a peculiar place in the public imagination. The seventeen-year-old gymnast who left New York paralyzed became China’s “smiling angel,” celebrated for meeting an unimaginable injury with optimism and resilience. It was a powerful story, but also, as the first article translated below suggests, it was a role that left little room for anger, grievance, or questions about what had actually happened. By 2010, Sang Lan was increasingly willing to ask those questions publicly, even if doing so meant exchanging the image of the “smiling angel” for that of a “troublemaker.”
In 2011, those questions moved into an American courtroom. Sang Lan’s sprawling lawsuit attracted attention partly because of its eye-catching $1.8 billion claim, but the dispute was about considerably more than a dollar figure. It reopened questions about responsibility for her accident, the promises made after it, the long-term protection of an athlete whose career ended on the competition floor, and Sang Lan’s right to challenge the version of her own story that others had told for years.
Sang Lan visits children in Mary’s Hospital in Beijing in May of 2011
Sang Lan came to the 1998 Goodwill Games in New York as China’s reigning national vault champion. During warm-ups for the vault final on July 21, however, her career ended in an instant. Attempting a front handspring timer, she visibly hesitated on her approach, failed to complete the rotation, and landed on her head. Rushed by ambulance to Nassau County Medical Center, she underwent emergency surgery three days later. Doctors ultimately concluded that the damage to her cervical spinal cord was irreversible, and she was told that she would never walk again. The accident became an international news story, drawing intense media attention in both China and the United States, visits from senior political figures including Chinese Vice Premier Qian Qichen and former U.S. President Jimmy Carter, and an outpouring of public support that transformed Sang Lan into a national symbol of resilience.
What follows are four contemporaneous accounts of those events, each offering a different vantage point on the same weeks. First, there’s a reported feature that lays out the chronology in full—the injury itself, Sang Lan’s path from a Ningbo sports school to the national team, and the political and civic response that followed. In addition, there are three more pieces: a reflection from the team’s physician, who was present at the moment of injury and remained at Sang Lan’s bedside through the days that followed; an essay from her coach, written from Beijing in the grip of his own grief; and a short public letter attributed to Sang Lan herself, composed from her hospital bed in the United States.
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.
Feng Jing, 2001
Note: Technically, Dmitri Bilozerchev is not the youngest men’s world all-around champion in history; Feng Jing is.
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.
Li Xiaopeng, 2000 Olympics, Copyright: Claus Bergmann
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!
Xiao Junfeng, 2000 Olympics, Copyright: Thomas Zimmermann
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.
