△ This is the 469th China Mosaic
Do you remember what you did on the summer break after you finished elementary school?
Zheng Haohao, a girl from southern China’s Guangdong Province, wrote in her summer schedule: Compete in the Olympics.
Zheng Haohao [source: Xinhua]
Zheng Haohao will turn 12 on the day of the closing ceremony of the Paris 2024 Olympics. As the youngest athlete at the Paris 2024, she competed for Team China in the women’s Park Skateboarding event.
Zhang Haohao has always been an energetic girl. Her 7th birthday gift was a skateboard — her very first one, which since then unlocked a different life trajectory for her. Despite her young age, she showed great interest and gift in this sport: as a swift and concentrated skater, when she made mistakes in her tricks, she could quickly adjust her moves to improve.
The great potential she showed in practice at her club drew the attention of a professional trainer, who soon recruited her to the city skateboard team of Huizhou, Guangdong. With professional training, Zheng Haohao gradually grew into a front-ranking skateboarder in China, and began to “skate” into larger arenas.
For Zheng Haohao, this is more like a process of self-challenging. When practicing one trick, she once fell on the landing, and ended up with a broken finger and a torn fingernail; but the injuries didn’t dampen her passion, on the contrary, she made that trick her signature.
At the Olympic Qualifier Series event in Budapest, Zheng Haohao missed in her second round of competition. But she managed to outperform herself under high pressure, winning her ticket to the Olympics in her last skate. For this 11-year-old, she does not seem to be obsessed with the results. Having fun and enjoying the sport is her goal.
Be it Zheng Haohao, or her teammate, 14-year-old street course skateboarder Cui Chenxi, or 18-year-old breaking athlete Liu Qingyi, or 18-year-old sport climber Luo Zhilu, they all have something in common — their Olympic journey dates way back to their childhood hobbies. For them, pushing their limits and enjoying the sport is equally, if not more, important than competition results.
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Being driven by love and enthusiasm for the sport, instead of being fixated with clinching a gold medal, has been the case for more and more Chinese athletes, a trait reflected in renowned athletes like Su Yiming and Gu Ailing back in the Winter Olympics in 2022. More and more young Chinese athletes like them will appear in the future.
What’s also worth noting is that, the sports these young athletes partake in, namely skateboarding, breaking, and sport climbing, together with surfing, are the four newly added sports at the Paris 2024. In recent years, these sports have enjoyed wide popularity among the younger generation, and including these “new” sports in the Olympics also proves how the centennial-old event stays young via self-iteration.
In a time of booming Generation Z and Generation Alpha athletes, the historical Olympic Games are brimming with the vigor of youth.
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