Zhu Ting stands tall in China — and not just because she is 1.98m tall. The 25-year-old farmer’s daughter has emerged from a poor village life to become a totem of the country’s sporting ambitions.
As captain and figurehead of China’s women’s volleyball team, the reigning Olympic champions, Zhu is one of the country’s biggest stars.
State television once feted her as “an invincible and dominant superhero.”
Photo: AFP
A nurse fighting the COVID-19 pandemic in March posted a photograph of herself wearing a white protective suit with a picture of the volleyball star drawn on it — also scribbled were the words: “Proud that I was born in the era of Zhu Ting.”
From an early age one thing was clear — she was tall. By 13, she stood more than 1.75m.
“When she was a little girl our family was so poor that we could not afford a photograph of her,” her father, Zhu Anliang, told state media after her heroics in Rio. “Now our lives are better, but when she comes back to the village she is still just an ordinary farm girl from an ordinary farmer’s family.”
All of Zhudalou village has benefited from Zhu’s success, with local officials replacing a dirt path to the entrance with a concrete one, which villagers branded “Zhu Ting road,” according to the Global Times.
After swapping village life for a state-run sports school — where the young Zhu cried for her parents at the outset — she made her debut for China in 2013.
Following the Rio Olympics, she moved to Turkey to play for VakifBank and reportedly signed a US$1.2 million contract, making her one of the highest-paid players in volleyball.
She returned to China to play for Tianjin in October last year, in preparation for helping her country defend their crown at the Tokyo Olympics.
It is a measure of her humble personality that each time praise comes her way, Zhu deflects it away from herself.
“Me being the captain is just an idea to the public, but within the team, I’m not really ‘leading’ my teammates,” Zhu said in an interview published yesterday. “They don’t call me captain, they call me Zhu.”
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