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.
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.
In September 1994, the Romanian women’s gymnastics team did something almost unthinkable: they went on strike. Fresh off winning the European team title, the athletes training at the national center in Deva suspended gymnastics training and refused to return to the gym, limiting themselves to outdoor conditioning. The dispute centered on prize money promised for medals won at the European and World Championships that had still not been paid months later because of bureaucratic delays and a dispute over how new government regulations should be applied.
The protest placed coach Octavian Belu in an unusual position. Rather than opposing the athletes, he publicly defended them, arguing that the team had waited since the spring for money repeatedly promised by government officials. Belu described the strike as a last resort after months of assurances failed to produce results, stressing that the dispute was financial rather than political. The timing was particularly risky: Romania was preparing for a series of international competitions and the upcoming World Championships in Dortmund, raising fears that a prolonged interruption could affect the team’s competitive readiness.
The strike lasted only a few days. After the dispute drew widespread attention and the Romanian Gymnastics Federation publicly backed the athletes, the government agreed to begin releasing the overdue payments. Training resumed, the gymnasts returned to competition, and the immediate crisis passed. Yet the episode offered a rare glimpse behind the image of Romania’s celebrated gymnastics machine, revealing that even the country’s most successful athletes sometimes had to fight simply to receive the rewards they had already earned.
Below, you can find a collection of Romanian newspaper articles about the strike.
Trying to escape from one’s training environment is an almost universal experience in elite gymnastics. When Liu Xuan came down with mumps, her teammates envied her because the illness offered a rare break from training. In Romania, Rodica Dunca later described the Károlyi system as a “concentration camp” and recalled a failed escape attempt with Melitta Rühn and Teodora Ungureanu before the Securitate brought them back. Mihaela Stănuleț remembered a similar episode, claiming that she and Rühn tried to run away only for Béla Károlyi to send dogs after them.
Czechoslovakia was no exception. During the summer of 1985, a group of national team gymnasts slipped away from the centralized training center in Nymburk and spent the night in the surrounding woods. Below are two accounts of the incident: Jana Lábaková’s recollection from 1992 and the contemporary version offered by the national team coach. Read side by side, the two narratives seem to describe the same event from different perspectives. Together, they leave the impression that the full story of what happened in Nymburk has never been completely told—that what survives on the page may be only the tip of the iceberg.
Published in 2012, Liu Xuan’s memoir Xuanmu offers a look back on the journey that shaped one of China’s most celebrated gymnasts. Written more than a decade after her retirement, it traces her path from a timid, sickly child in Changsha to Olympic champion, while also exploring the personal costs of that transformation.
The opening chapters focus on Liu’s childhood and introduction to gymnastics, providing a vivid portrait of the training culture that defined Chinese gymnastics in the 1980s and early 1990s. Alongside stories of relentless conditioning, competition, and athletic ambition, Liu recalls a childhood marked by contradictions. She disliked many aspects of training, envied classmates who spent their afternoons in school, celebrated bouts of illness because they offered a brief escape from the gym, and at times questioned whether gymnastics was worth the sacrifice at all. Yet she also remembers the coaches, teammates, and family members who sustained her along the way. The result is a rare first-person account of the grueling system that produced generations of elite Chinese gymnasts.
Enjoy!
Liu Xuan, 2000 Olympics, Copyright: imago/Schreyer
After the 1976 Chunichi Cup, the organizers published an entire commemorative book dedicated to Nadia Comăneci’s trip to Japan. The volume — titled Everything about Comăneci — captures both the sporting spectacle and the cultural phenomenon surrounding her five-day stay in the country. It was a brief visit by any measure: she arrived at Haneda on November 11, competed on the 13th and 14th, and was on a JAL flight to Hamburg by the morning of the 15th. Yet in that span, she scored two perfect 10s, set an all-time competition record of 39.75, and sent Japan into what the book calls a “white fairy” craze. More than 6,000 tickets had sold out on the day they went on sale, and an additional 1,000 walk-up tickets vanished in two hours to fans who had queued through the night.
The book blends competition reporting with intimate biographical detail: her spartan diet of juice, bread, and apples; the cramped taxi rides with Károlyi and her teammates; her birthday dinner on November 12 — her first celebrated outside Romania — at which she was presented with a Japanese doll and the radio cassette player she had been hoping for. It is a portrait of a 15-year-old navigating the full weight of global celebrity with what the authors describe as a guileless, unaffected ease. Below, you can find select pages and translations from the book.
This might be my favorite photo from the book. The cup was colossal.
The caption reads: Comăneci smiles, Chunichi Cup in hand — The great crowd gave her their unsparing applause.
When the scoreboard at the 1976 Montréal Olympics repeatedly flashed 1.00 — the display’s rendering of a perfect 10.0 — Ellen Berger, the newly elected president of the FIG’s Women’s Technical Committee, was among the officials prepared to defend the judges’ decisions. The marks, she insisted, had been rightfully awarded: they reflected routines of the highest possible perfection. Each 10.0 also signaled, in Berger’s reading, a new stratum of performance quality — an elevation into territory above the 9s that reflected just how dramatically the sport had advanced.
Not everyone agreed. Sovetsky Sport noted at the time that Larisa Latynina had disputed the judgment of the panel — headed by Berger herself — over Comăneci’s perfect 10.0 on compulsory bars, with slow-motion television replays suggesting her dismount landing had not been entirely flawless. For Berger, however, the tens were not an aberration. The path forward for women’s gymnastics, she argued, ran through the pursuit of ever-greater difficulty paired with flawless execution — and Montréal had proven the point.
