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.
Olympic all-around champion, world all-around champion, and one of China’s greatest athletes, Li Xiaoshuang was among the biggest stars in world gymnastics during the mid-1990s. Yet there is much about him that remains unfamiliar to English-language readers.
For starters, “Li Xiaoshuang” is not actually his given name. Born an identical twin, he was originally named Li Fenghua (李锋华). His older twin brother was Li Weihua (李卫华). Because almost no one could tell the boys apart, their first coach renamed them Dashuang (“Big Twin”) and Xiaoshuang (“Little Twin”), nicknames that eventually replaced their given names entirely. To Chinese readers, this is immediately apparent; to many English readers, it is not.
These two articles, published in Wenshi Chunqiu in 1998, tell the story behind that famous name. They begin not with Olympic medals but with Li’s childhood in rural Hubei, his remarkable relationship with his twin brother, and the coach who discovered the boys and devoted himself to their development. Along the way, they introduce a chatty, mischievous, and fiercely competitive young athlete whom the world came to know simply as “Little Twin.”
Li Xiaoshuang, 1996 Olympics, Copyright: imago/Sven Simon
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.
Valeri Liukin emerged as one of the Soviet Union’s leading gymnasts in 1987. During the first half of the year, he won the European and USSR all-around titles and established himself as a contender for the World Championships. His breakthrough coincided with one of the sport’s defining moments of the decade: the successful introduction of the triple back on floor exercise, a feat that immediately secured his place in gymnastics history.
The three articles translated here capture Liukin at that turning point. Rather than looking back from the perspective of his later career—or of his daughter Nastia’s Olympic success—they present him as contemporaries saw him in 1987: a fearless young gymnast from Kazakhstan whose daring, technical innovation, and close partnership with coach Eduard Yarov had made him one of the Soviet Union’s brightest stars. Together, they trace the development of the triple salto, explore the coach-athlete relationship behind his success, and reveal the expectations surrounding his first World Championships in Rotterdam—along with his repeated flirtation with quitting the sport.
Note: For more on the triple back salto, see the appendix in this post.
By the end of 1991, Li Chunyang had established himself as the world’s premier horizontal bar specialist. He won back-to-back world titles in Stuttgart (1989) and Indianapolis (1991), helped China to consecutive World Championship team silver medals, the men’s team gold at the 1990 Asian Games, and Olympic team silver at Barcelona in 1992.
This profile appeared in New Sports in early 1990, shortly after Li’s breakthrough victory in Stuttgart. Rather than focusing on the competition itself, it traces the making of a champion—from his discovery as a schoolboy in Shantou and his development under Gao Jian and Huang Yubin to his emergence as the new “King of the Horizontal Bar.” Along the way, it also captures a defining feature of Chinese gymnastics in the 1980s: its determination to match and surpass the Soviet Union in technical innovation, exemplified by Li’s pursuit of the triple back on floor exercise after seeing Valeri Liukin debut the skill in Europe.
Li Chunyang, 1992 Olympics, Copyright: imago/WEREK
Within the gymnastics community, Lou Yun is best known for winning back-to-back Olympic vault titles in 1984 and 1988. Two of his innovations—a handspring rudi on vault and a double side salto with a ¾ twist on floor exercise—appear in the FIG Code of Points under his name. Outside the competitive arena, however, he has repeatedly reinvented himself. Spanning nearly twenty-five years, the articles translated here trace his evolution from Olympic champion to entrepreneur and eventually to one of the public faces of China’s Olympic movement. Although they do not constitute a complete biography, they offer a far fuller portrait of Lou Yun’s life compared to his remarkably sparse Wikipedia page.
The two texts translated here—a 2001 profile from New Sports and a 2004 Sina.com chat transcript—capture former Chinese gymnast Li Xiaoping during a new phase of his life. One of the world’s leading pommel horse specialists in the early 1980s, Li won the world title in 1981, helped China to its first men’s team world championship in 1983, and earned an Olympic team silver medal at Los Angeles in 1984 before retiring because of injury. By the time these pieces appeared, he and his wife, Wen Jia, herself a former member of the Chinese national team, had built a successful gymnastics club in Southern California while raising a family far from the country where they had made their names.
The New Sports article introduces the couple through Beijing’s successful bid for the 2008 Olympics, describing Li’s emotional reaction to the announcement before recounting their move to the United States, years of financial struggle, and eventual success as gymnastics coaches. The later Sina.com interview is more conversational, allowing Li and Wen Jia to reflect on immigration, entrepreneurship, family life, and their enduring ties to China. Together, the two pieces provide an unusually personal look at two former elite athletes as they navigated life after competition while remaining closely connected to the sport—and to the country—that had shaped them.
Note: Li Xiaoping and Li Xiaopeng are two different gymnasts. Newspaper articles and photo archives often confuse the two. To make matters more confusing, Li Xiaoping is the father-in-law of Li Xiaopeng. Li Xiaopeng, the 2000 and 2008 gold medalist on parallel bars, married Li “Angel” Anqi, who is one of Li Xiaoping’s daughters.
Wu Jiani was one of the most accomplished gymnasts of the early 1980s. At sixteen, she won three gold medals at the 1982 Asian Games and received the only perfect 10 awarded in the women’s competition. A year earlier, she had claimed a bronze medal on balance beam at the World Championships in Moscow, and her shoulder-destroying uneven bars release—commonly called the “Jiani Leap”— was recognized by the International Gymnastics Federation. She would later help China earn its first Olympic team medal in women’s artistic gymnastics, taking bronze at the 1984 Los Angeles Games.
The four profiles translated here, written between 1980 and 1983, are less interested in those achievements than in explaining how they became possible. Each returns to her unlikely beginning in the sport. Wu arrived at the national team with protruding knee joints, stiff ankles, and legs so weak that coaches compared them to those of a child recovering from polio. She failed to finish among the top thirty at her first national championships. Coaches reportedly decided three separate times to send her home, only to relent after watching her climb back onto the apparatus following yet another fall. Again and again, the articles attribute her transformation not to extraordinary talent but to extraordinary persistence: endless repetitions, late-night conditioning sessions, and an almost preternatural refusal to complain.
Read together, the profiles reveal something larger than the career of a single gymnast. They belong to a recognizable genre of Chinese sports writing in which athletic excellence serves as evidence of moral character. Wu’s story—frail child, repeated setbacks, silent perseverance, eventual triumph—was a narrative that readers would have recognized from countless profiles of elite athletes during the reform era. The details vary from article to article, but the structure remains remarkably consistent.
The differences are equally revealing. Three of the profiles were written for readers inside China and dwell on physical shortcomings, repeated failure, and the harsh demands of elite training. The fourth profile appeared in the English-language edition of China Pictorial, a Chinese state magazine published for overseas readers. Unlike the domestic profiles, it smooths away many of the rough edges. The malformed joints disappear, the coaches no longer contemplate sending her home, and the emphasis shifts to a determined girl practicing on a log in her bedroom before emerging as an international champion. Read side by side, the four articles offer not only a portrait of one of China’s pioneering gymnasts but also a glimpse of how the country chose to tell different versions of the same sporting success to domestic and international audiences.
Nellie Kim’s memoir, The Smell of Melon (Zapakh Dyni), was serialized in the Soviet sports newspaper Sovetsky Sport in February 1983, three years after the Moscow Olympics. It traces her journey from childhood in Chimkent (now Shymkent, Kazakhstan) to the pinnacle of international gymnastics.
By then, Kim was already one of the sport’s most decorated athletes: a five-time Olympic gold medalist across the 1976 and 1980 Games, the 1979 world all-around champion, and a key contributor to multiple Soviet team victories at World Championships and other major international competitions.
The Smell of Melon does not focus solely on Kim’s triumphant moments. In fact, it devotes considerable attention to uncertainty, self-doubt, and the long process of becoming an elite athlete. Kim writes candidly about difficult training sessions, conflicts with coaches, homesickness, injuries, and the emotional highs and lows that accompanied her rise through the Soviet gymnastics system. The memoir is also rich in portraits of the people who shaped her career, including her parents, coach Vladimir Baydin, Larisa Latynina, Olga Korbut, Ludmilla Tourischeva, Maria Filatova, and even Nadia Comăneci.
The translation below follows the original 1983 newspaper serialization as it appeared in Sovetsky Sport.
