Chinese teenager who trains through the pain takes skipping rope team to five world championship records

Cen Xiaolin knows that small steps can become giant leaps – as a member of the Chinese team at the World Jump Rope Championship held in Oslo last month, he smashed five records.

The 17-year-old, one of four children from a family of migrant workers in the southern province of Guangdong, was acclaimed as the “world’s most powerful thigh” for skipping 1,141 times in three minutes, a rate of 6.33 jumps a second.

His journey began in 2012, when he was a pupil at Qixing primary school in the Huadu district of Guangzhou and the local education authority decided to promote skipping.

But the success for Xiaolin and his teammates have enjoyed – they have won gold medals in domestic and international competitions – did not come easy.

Not only does he spend two to four hours training each day, the majority of pupils at his school either came from local farming families or, like Xiaolin’s were migrants from the countryside.