Meet the winners of the gold medal for sheer grit and inspiration
Liu Yan, 71, fell down a stairway, sending his blood pressure soaring. His doctor told him that he was lucky not to have suffered a stroke. Liu's family insisted he rest for two months in his suburban home.
Feeling his age for the first time, Liu was plunged into despair. While biding his time resting at home, he watched the Tokyo Olympics and saw Ni Xialian, a 58-year-old Shanghai native who represents Luxembourg, play a match of table tennis against South Korea's Shin Yu-bin, 40 years her junior.
"She looked so youthful and full of life!" Liu recalled. "It instantly cheered me up, even though she lost the game."
It seems the Olympics, where age 30 is usually considered "over the hill," were a tonic for people feeling their age.
"This Olympics completely cured my anxiety about aging," one vlogger posted. "Su Bingtian is still running at age 32 and broke the Asian record. Lu Xiaojun is still weight-lifting at 37 and won a gold medal. Ni Xialian is the oldest table tennis Olympian at 58. I can never use the excuse that I'm already 30 years old to give up anymore."
The post got more than 30,000 thumbs-up in two hours, with netizens adding more inspiring athletes from the Games.
The list runs long. It includes 46-year-old gymnast Oksana Chusovitina, who competed in her eighth Olympic Games; Javad Foroughi, a 41-year-old Iranian coronavirus nurse who trained for air pistol shooting in the hospital basement; Ken Terauchi, a 41-year-old springboard athlete competing in his sixth Olympics; Guatemalan Kevin Cordon, 34, the first Central American ever to reach the semifinals in Olympics badminton; and Gong Lijiao, 32, who won gold in the women's shot put.
When athletes turn 30, most consider retirement because their bodies are considered past their peak. This year's Olympians from around the world laid to rest the idea that age is such a great factor in performance.
"I was so excited and inspired by Yang Qian, who was born in 2000, the same year as me, when she won the first gold medal for Team China in the 10m air rifle final.
"At that time, I didn't expect to be inspired by so many veteran athletes later," said university junior Jessica Xie. "They are so inspirational. I will never again say I feel old."
Last year's national census showed those 60 and older account for 18.7 percent of the population, 5.4 percentage points higher than in the 2010 census. China is now the country with the largest and fastest-growing aged population in the world.
But anxiety of aging isn't confined to the elderly. The generation born in the 1980s are now starting to suffer from mid-life crisis, bearing the brunt of caring for two parents as only children of their era. They often are bemused by those born in the 1990s moaning about "feeling old."
Even Xie and her peers born after 2000 are saying the catchphrase "we are old" – perhaps half-jokingly – which may explain why stories of older athletes went viral in China during Tokyo Olympics.
Let's meet a few of them.
Chinese sprinter Su Bingtian reacts after running in the men's 100-meter semifinals at the Tokyo Olympics on August 1.
Su Bingtian, 32, sprinter
Su was hailed as sushen, or "Heavenly Su," after he set an Asian record of 9.83 seconds in the semifinals of the 100-meter dash in Tokyo, becoming the first Asian man to reach the finals in 89 years, and though he finished sixth in the event, he ran the race in 9.98s.
Netizens discovered the story of painstaking years the associate professor at Jinan University spent pushing his body to the limits.
"I realized that all the other competitors were born in the late 1990s and even after 2000," so I am considered old," Su said in a previous interview.
For the men's 100 meters, it is common for athletes to retire around the age of 26, but Su chose to continue his training, exploring scientific ways to increase his speed, including changing the leg used to start the race. It worked.
In 2019, he published a paper calling on Chinese authorities to provide opportunities for "veteran sprinters."
"Through research, we found that some athletes in China retire too early ...," he wrote. "Veteran athletes can still create personal best performances. But a large number of athletes choose to retire at age of 26 or so, missing the possibility of further improvement."
Javad Foroughi of Iran wins the gold medal by defeating Damir Mikec of Team Serbia during the finals of the 10m Air Pistol Men's event on day one of the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games on July 24.
Javad Foroughi, 41, sports shooter
The full-time nurse and Olympic rookie won a gold medal in the men's 10-meter air pistol, setting a new Olympic record and winning Iran's first-ever gold medal in shooting at the Olympics.
Foroughi also was the oldest medalist in Iranian Olympic history.
In previous interviews, the marksman revealed that he practiced pistol shooting in the basement of the hospital where he works as a nurse. Iranian newspapers reported that the head coach of the country's national team believed Iran had no chance of winning a medal in the sport this year.
Netizens were even more astounded to learn that Foroughi was also a frontline nurse on a coronavirus ward and was twice infected with the virus. He had to give up training for an entire month because of the disease.
"As a nurse, I tell everyone if we follow the protocols, nobody will have COVID-19 and the whole world will be healthy," he said in the post-game interview.
"I tell all people, as a shooter and as a nurse, to support each other's health, and I'm very happy that coronavirus didn't cancel the Olympics," he added.
Oksana Chusovitina, a gymnast of Uzbekistan, takes part in Artistic Gymnastics women's qualification vaulting in Tokyo on July 25.
Oksana Chusovitina, 46, gymnast
Chusovitina, in her eighth and last Olympics, has competed for the former Soviet Union, Uzbekistan and Germany since the 1992 Barcelona Olympics, when she won a team gold medal.
In 2002, her son was diagnosed with leukemia, hitting the family with impossible medical bills. She was invited to join a gymnastics association in Cologne and moved to Germany, where she was naturalized in 2006. She won a silver medal in the vault for Germany at the 2008 Beijing Olympics.
Four years later after the London Olympics, she announced her retirement but ended up competing again, this time for her home country Uzbekistan, in 2013. She said her goal was to win an Olympic medal.
Though she failed to qualify for the final in Tokyo, her presence endeared her to many Chinese netizens.
Ni Xialian of Luxembourg in action against Shin Yu-bin of South Korea during her Women's Singles Round 2 match on day two of the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games on July 25.
Ni Xialian, 58, paddler
"I am short, I am old, I have an old-fashioned style of playing, but I believe I have a good attitude, which helped me to get this far," Ni said in 2019, after she qualified for her fifth Olympics.
That upbeat attitude was apparent when she competed against 17-year-old South Korean Shin Yu-bin in the second round of the women's table tennis singles. The game went viral, punctuated with her signature hearty laugh. Ni lost the game but won the hearts of the public.
"I enjoyed it," Ni said in a post-game interview, before listing her own missteps in the game.
The Shanghai native won gold medals for China at the World Championships in 1983, long before many of her current fans were born.
When table tennis became an Olympic sport in 1988, Ni had retired from the national team and enrolled in Shanghai Jiao Tong University. She later left for Germany and picked up table tennis again, eventually accepting an invitation to represent Luxembourg.
Local media reports showed Ni in her colorful garden after returning to Luxembourg.
"I have many interests in life outside of sports," she said. "I can't devote 100 percent of my time to table tennis like a professional. Nothing is always perfect in this world, and nothing is all bad, so there is no need to be anxious about it."
