It was a political gaffe for Chinese short track speedskater Zhou Yang (周洋) — failing to thank her country and its government after her gold medal finish at the Vancouver Olympics.
But the 18-year-old is winning widespread support for her honesty and naivety, after being criticized by a top sports official for mentioning her parents in a post-win interview but failing to express gratitude for the Chinese sports system.
“How can somebody love their country if they don’t even love their parents?” China Youth Daily reporter Ma Jing (馬競) wrote in an opinion piece published on Tuesday, echoing the many online comments supporting Zhou in a case that is currently one of the hottest topics on Chinese Internet sites.
Zhou won gold in the 1,500m race and the 3,000m relay in her Olympic debut. After her 1,500m win on Feb. 20, a breathless Zhou told China Central Television: “It’s my dream. After winning the gold I might change a lot, become more confident and help my parents have a better life.”
She thanked her coach and teammates, but never mentioned the state-run sports system in which she had trained as an athlete for much of her life.
“It’s right to respect and thank your parents, but you also have to have the country in your heart. The country must come first. Don’t just talk about your parents,” said Yu Zaiqing (于再清), deputy director of the General Administration of Sport, in widely reported comments earlier this week.
Yu, who is also an International Olympic Committee vice president, added that the sports system must step up “moral education” for athletes.
He’s been skewered in comments on countless Web sites, where many Chinese who are normally hesitant to voice opinions speak freely because of the anonymity found online. His entry on Baidu Baike, a site similar to Wikipedia, was temporarily changed to say “Yu Zaiqing, male ... no mother and no father, raised by the Communist Party.”
Zhou’s family has defended her behavior, saying she is a young woman unfamiliar with the political demands facing Chinese athletes.
“Of course she’s naive! If she’s not naive why would she say something like that?” said Zhou’s aunt, surnamed Wang.
“Zhou Yang is very introverted, her life is eating, sleeping and training,” Wang said. “Of course her parents have sacrificed a lot too.”
Yu’s remarks underscore the ties binding sports to politics in China, where youngsters picked for their athletic abilities and specific physical traits undergo years of grueling training, with the singular goal of “winning glory for the country.”
But Zhou appeared to be more concerned about her parents’ welfare than her country, a move that has struck a chord among Chinese.
“For a girl who has a humble wish to let her parents live a comfortable life, she was heroic in her struggle to win these two gold medals for China, but then encountered such criticism,” sports columnist Sa Fu (薩福) of Chinese Internet portal 163.com wrote. “This is the real humiliation for the country.”
On Tuesday, officials tried to deflect criticism of Yu, who made his comments on Sunday during a sports committee meeting of the National People’s Congress. A fellow committee member said the group was discussing athletes in general and not Zhou specifically.
And Zhou appeared to have learned her lesson. Several Web sites on Tuesday carried comments attributed to her, in which she gave thanks to all the right people.
“I thank the country for providing us with excellent conditions, for giving us the excellent conditions for our Olympic campaign,” she was quoted as saying. “And I thank everyone who supported us, I thank our coaches, I thank the staff and I thank my mom and dad.”
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
‘DISAPPEARED COMPLETELY’: The melting of thousands of glaciers is a major threat to people in the landlocked region that already suffers from a water shortage Near a wooden hut high up in the Kyrgyz mountains, scientist Gulbara Omorova walked to a pile of gray rocks, reminiscing how the same spot was a glacier just a few years ago. At an altitude of 4,000m, the 35-year-old researcher is surrounded by the giant peaks of the towering Tian Shan range that also stretches into China, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. The area is home to thousands of glaciers that are melting at an alarming rate in Central Asia, already hard-hit by climate change. A glaciologist, Omarova is recording that process — worried about the future. She hiked six hours to get to
The number of people in Japan aged 100 or older has hit a record high of more than 95,000, almost 90 percent of whom are women, government data showed yesterday. The figures further highlight the slow-burning demographic crisis gripping the world’s fourth-biggest economy as its population ages and shrinks. As of Sept. 1, Japan had 95,119 centenarians, up 2,980 year-on-year, with 83,958 of them women and 11,161 men, the Japanese Ministry of Health said in a statement. On Sunday, separate government data showed that the number of over-65s has hit a record high of 36.25 million, accounting for 29.3 percent of