• Email Us: [email protected]
  • Contact Us: +1 718 618 4351
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Medical Market Report

  • Home
  • All Reports
  • About Us
  • Contact Us

China’s elite snowboarders herald new wave of Olympians

September 13, 2021 by David Barret Leave a Comment

September 13, 2021

SHANGHAI (Reuters) – As elite snowboarder Liu Jiayu trains for the 2022 Winter Olympics, it’s not just her platinum blond-streaked ponytail that stands out – she also has a colourful, personal and public social media presence, a relative rarity for Chinese athletes.

Instagram pictures show her performing tricks in midair, or even making an obscene gesture as she stares stonily into the camera.

“Take me back to the snowboard,” she says in the caption.

Snowboarding, a relatively new Olympic sport, is often synonymous with a colourful, nomadic lifestyle as riders chase seasonal snow. In China, the sport has brought to the foreground some of the country’s top riders, such as Liu, 28, 27-year-old Cai Xuetong, whose expressive social media content is emblematic of a new tribe of Chinese Olympians who are willing to get personal, publicly.

Before the pandemic, Liu and Cai often spent more time abroad than in China, training in countries New Zealand and Switzerland and returning home only to see their families, said German trainer Felix Falkenberg, sport science and performance manager at Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC), who has been working with them for the last two months in Shanghai.

Training with foreign coaches, often internationally, is a dramatic departure from the monolithic state systems that many Chinese Olympians have been through.

Liu and Cai “live that snowboarding lifestyle,” Falkenberg said.

There is growing appetite in China for sports personalities like Liu and Cai, who exhibit more of their personal lives.

Yang Qian, 21, who won gold twice at the Tokyo Olympics in shooting, posed on the podium with her hands above her head in the shape of a heart, earning applause from the Chinese internet.

Although Yang and a few other female athletes sparked debate for social media posts that focused on selfies, nails and idols – not training and competing – polls showed the public roundly sided with the shooter and her extroverted peers.

Liu and Cai’s training this summer took place at the Shanghai UFC Performance Institute – the first foreign high performance adviser to the Chinese Olympic Committee, said Kevin Chang, UFC’s senior vice president for the Asia Pacific region.

Both riders have foreign company sponsorship deals or are being chased by them, are flying to Switzerland soon and have overseas social media accounts that are blocked in China. But their earlier, more traditional training experiences still linger, their coach said.

“That sort of structured system from their childhood when they were in their provincial teams definitely comes through,” Falkenberg said. “They have a goal and they know how they’re going to achieve that.”

(Reporting by Engen Tham in Shanghai and Kane Wu in Hong Kong. Editing by Gerry Doyle)

Source Link China’s elite snowboarders herald new wave of Olympians

David Barret
David Barret

Related posts:

  1. ‘Incredible fear’ among women across Afghanistan -U.N. official
  2. United employees receiving COVID-19 vaccine religious exemption face unpaid leave
  3. Mexican abortion ban punished poor women, top justice says
  4. Strong Acapulco quake aftershocks unnerve Mexican resort’s residents

Filed Under: News

Reader Interactions

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Primary Sidebar

  • Neanderthals And Homo Sapiens Coexisted For Longer Where Herbivore Hunting Was Good
  • Sun Rips Hole In Earth’s Magnetic Field Sparking Rare Red Auroras
  • Flowers Are Thriving In Antarctica, Suggesting It Might Be Reaching A “Tipping Point”
  • Making Of Birch Tar Proves Neanderthal Intelligence And Cooperation
  • Worms Might Have Basic “Emotions” In Response To Electric Shocks
  • It’s Definitive – The Gulf Stream Is Weakening
  • The Zoo Hypothesis: A “Psychologically Unpleasant” Idea Why Aliens Haven’t Made Contact
  • New Method Can Tell If We’ve Found Signs Of Alien Life
  • What Is Water Intoxication? Chris Pratt Claims To Drink An Alarming Amount Of Water
  • ChatGPT Will Soon “See, Hear, And Speak” With Its Latest AI Update
  • The Mars Sample Return Mission Is In Trouble
  • Ligers and Tigons: The Results Of Big Cat Mashups That Shouldn’t Really Exist
  • Another TRAPPIST-1 Planet Seems To Lack Atmosphere, And The Star Is Not Helping
  • Old Video From 2018 Seems To Show What The “Mummified Aliens” Really Are
  • Holly Tree Lost For Nearly Two Centuries Rediscovered In Forests Of Brazil
  • Genetic Studies Rediscover Human Populations In Africa Thought To Be Lost
  • Dinosaur Feather Fossils Reveal Proteins Preserved For Millions Of Years
  • What Lies Underneath The Sahara Desert?
  • What Will Happen To All The Used Electric Car Batteries?
  • The Science Of Monogamy: Is There A Biological Explanation?
  • Business
  • Health
  • News
  • Science
  • Technology
  • +1 718 618 4351
  • +91 78878 22626
  • [email protected]
Office Address
Prudour Pvt. Ltd. 420 Lexington Avenue Suite 300 New York City, NY 10170.

Powered by Prudour Network

Copyrights © 2023 · Medical Market Report. All Rights Reserved.

Go to mobile version