Category: 2008

While much of the U.S. coverage of He Kexin focused on her age, there were many profiles of He Kexin in the Chinese press. They painted a portrait almost entirely different in emphasis: not a suspicious document trail, but a girl from Beijing with trembling hands and an idol named Khorkina.

The American story was essentially demographic — a birth year, an age, a discrepancy. The Chinese story was biographical, and its details had the texture of something lived rather than constructed. A coach named Shang Chunyan remembered going to a kindergarten near Yonghegong in 1997, looking for recruits among five-year-olds. She noticed a small girl — not tall, not overweight, nothing exceptional yet. She took her anyway. That girl, years later, would win China’s seventh gold medal of the Beijing Games.

The road was not straight. When the national team selectors visited the Beijing squad to scout for Olympic prospects, their first impression of He Kexin was unflattering. She was “bent everywhere,” one coach recalled — her movements awkward, her form uninspiring. The only time she looked graceful was when she was upside down. They took her on that basis, as something of a gamble, and she rewarded the gamble almost immediately. A foot injury that ruled out balance beam and floor exercise forced her coaches to try an experiment: put her entirely on the uneven bars. In two months, she had mastered the Li Ya salto, one of the most demanding release skills in the sport. Her coaches were astonished. The nickname “Princess of the Uneven Bars” was not far behind.

But the profiles also preserved the setbacks. At the 2007 City Games, she fell off uneven bars. Afterward, she sat alone in the stands and watched the rest of the competition in silence, refusing to eat, refusing to rest — as if she were punishing herself. It was, reporters noted, the most heartbroken she had ever been. That moment of private devastation appears in multiple accounts, always in the same register: not as a scandal but as evidence of seriousness, of how much it mattered to her. The same attentiveness extended to smaller details. During a team training check, coaches discovered she had skipped lunch and eaten only a piece of chocolate before the afternoon competition. She told them she was afraid of feeling heavy on the apparatus. She never threw a temper tantrum when disciplined. When a surprise dormitory inspection ended with everyone else quietly slipping away, she stayed and cleaned the room herself.

By the time the Beijing Olympics arrived, these stories had accumulated into a coherent character: diligent, self-possessed, quietly stubborn. On the night of the uneven bars final, competing first against a field that included three recent world champions, she admitted afterward that her hands had been shaking. She said she hadn’t let herself think about the gold medal, because the more you think about gold, the more pressure you feel. She performed a flawless routine. When American star Nastia Liukin matched her score of 16.725, He Kexin didn’t yet know the tie-breaking rules that would ultimately decide in her favor; she thought they might simply share the gold. When the rankings appeared on the screen, and she realized she had won outright, she ran over to Yang Yilin, who had just finished her own routine, and lifted her up.

The profiles collected here were published across several days in August 2008, in outlets ranging from the People’s Daily and Oriental Sports Daily to the PLA Daily, which capped its coverage with an earnest poem comparing He Kexin to a swallow in flight. These profiles are historical documents not only of what she accomplished, but of how China chose to present her.