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December 20, 2014

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For retired athletes, life can take wrong turn

The former gymnast wearing a sport suit stands on his hands for several minutes in a Shanghai Metro station, drawing the attention of passengers. With a plate in front of him, he is doing performance begging.

Two small signs he puts up tell a story that distinguishes him from ordinary beggars. One has his name “Zhang Shangwu,” while the other is a photo of him with a gold medal around his neck, revealing his identity as a retired champion gymnast.

His appearance in Shanghai last week has aroused heated discussion about the lives of retired athletes.

Some sociologists criticized the athlete training system with its focus on winning medals. But plenty of retired athletes who managed successful career shifts said athletes can get through the low ebb when their careers end.

Zhang, born in 1983 in Baoding, Hebei Province, was recruited by the national gymnastics team in 1995, and reached his peak at 18 with two medals at the World University Games in 2001. However, he was forced to retire in 2005 after rupturing his left Achilles tendon.

It has been downhill ever since for Zhang. He was sentenced for criminal theft in 2007 and has been seen performance begging in Shijiazhuang of Hebei Province, Tianjing and Beijing since 2011.

Zhang was hired as deputy director of a charity in 2011, but he quit less than four months later. The last straw was the humiliation he felt from some critics of the charity when participating in a TV talk program with Chen Guangbiao, a famous Chinese philanthropist.

Zhang went back to street performing in different cities, and even sold his gold medal for just 100 yuan (US$16.39). He told media earlier that he’s doing this because he needed money to pay for the treatment of his grandfather back home who suffered cerebral thrombosis.

“How could a champion end up this way? He should have some other way to make a living,” a Shanghai subway passenger commented in an online forum.

Though many passengers find it hard to believe that a champion could ever live by begging, Zhang is hardly the only retired athlete to find a dark turn in life after leaving the sports spotlight.

Zou Chunlan, a national weightlifting champion who broke national and world records, was reported rubbing and cleaning customers’ backs in a public bathhouse in Changchun of northeastern China’s Jilin Province in 2006, with very limited income.

Zhang Fukang, who was credited as the best goalkeeper in Asia for his performance in the 1988 Seoul Olympics, now runs a small lottery shop in Shanghai after his recovery from a mental health issue via a psychiatric rehabilitation center.

Cai Li, a weightlifter with about 40 national championships and 20 Asian titles during an illustrious career, died of difficult breathing in 2003 due to obesity. He was only 33 years old and had been financially struggling before death.

Being a sports star is never a lifelong career, as no athlete can escape the inevitable decline with age.

Injury is another hazard that can cut down even a great athlete’s career long before expected.

There were an estimated 200,000 retired professional athletes in China by 2012, with more than 3,000 retiring each year, according to Eastday.com, a leading Shanghai-based news portal. Though some retired athletes are given the chance to apply for civil servant positions or to coach, many are not. About 40 percent at least initially face unemployment, and they receive a one-off compensation — either from their clubs or from the government — that typically amounts to a few months of salary.

A burdening task

Many athletic teams in China, aiming to develop elite performers, have closed training systems in which the athletes spend almost all of their time practicing and working out. Very little work on regular education, which would help them after retirement, is included.

Weightlifter Zou told local media that she could not find any job after retirement because her education was limited to a grade-3 primary school level.

“Taking gold medals as the goal of sports is a mistake from the root,” says Shanghai sociologist Gu Xiaoming.

He says sports should be a way to benefit people’s health while testing their potential and persistence. It should be a beneficial tool rather than a burdening task, he says.

“Former Chinese leader Chairman Mao Zedong said that the task of China’s sports work should be developing sports while improving people’s fitness. Since when have we filled our hearts with nothing but gold medal dreams?” says Gu. “It is against the spirit of sports.”

Gu insists that it makes no sense to abandon education in the pursuit of big success in sports. These are faults of the national sports system but athletes themselves also bear some of the blame, Gu says.

“There are good examples of athletes who can manage being winners in both sports and lives,” says Gu.

That includes ping-pong champion Deng Yaping, who earned a PhD. at Cambridge University and worked in Beijing for the International Olympic Committee, and retired Shanghai swimmer Shen Jianqiang, who operates several swimming clubs in Shanghai after getting a post-graduate degree at Tsukuba University in Japan.

Sun Ji, 32-year-old retired soccer player from the former Shanghai Shenhua Football Club, never regretted becoming a professional athlete.

He says the long-term training not only helped him realize his dream as a player, but also granted him precious qualities like persistence that helped him shift focus after retiring from the club.

“I am not in the position to judge about whether the system is good enough for retired athletes. But I believe that one can make himself a master in every trade, as long as he knows what he is capable of and works hard enough,” says Sun, whose twin brother, Sun Xiang, is still playing in a Guangdong club.

He started planning his future career about two years before retiring from the club in 2012. He says that most retired soccer players he knows still work in fields related to the sport, which is also his target. He got a position as commentator at Shanghai TV Station.

Starting a new career is not easy, but Sun believes he can manage it with the persistence he learned as an athlete.

“I have my advantage. I know how it works on the football pitch and how it feels to dash on it, but it was still difficult at first to precisely and professionally convey that to an audience, as speaking was not my thing as an athlete,” says Sun. “I am very grateful for all the help given by my colleagues.”

Sun also runs a teenage soccer center to encourage children to play the game. According to him, about 1,000 children play football in his center every weekend. Some of the talented kids will be selected for further training based on their willingness.

“I am a lucky guy to catch the soccer professionalism when I was an athlete, and I am even luckier to witness the development of national sports and fitness when I am retired,” says Sun. “I have no regrets about my choice to take sports as my career.”




 

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