Winter Olympics: who are Shen Xue and Zhao Hongbo, the golden couple behind China’s Beijing champions Sui Wenjing and Han Cong?
- Shen and Zhao have witnessed China’s emergence as a world-class winter sports power, playing a key part in their rise with gold in Vancouver 2010
- Their pupils Sui Wenjing and Han Cong are carrying on the legacy with powerful performances in Beijing that also earned them gold
Coaches Shen Xue and Zhao Hongbo were in the audience last night, as their pupils Sui Wenjing and Han Cong followed in their footsteps and took home China’s second Olympic gold in pair figure skating. Nostalgia was felt by Chinese fans on a celebratory evening.
Beijing 2022 is China’s arrival as a world-class winter sports power, and Shen and Zhao have been its eye witnesses since the beginning. The two paired up in 1992 - the year their student Han Cong, three years his partner’s elder, was born.
Eighteen years into their career on the ice, Shen and Zhao showed off for one last time at the Vancouver Games, where they made history as the first Chinese figure skating pair to win the gold medal as well as the oldest Olympic champions in the sport.
At 31 and 36 years old respectively, Shen and Zhao broke Russia’s 46-year, 12-gold medal streak in Olympic pairs figure skating. At the same event, their teammates Pang Qing and Tong Jian claimed silver.
A dozen years later, or, as netizens are catching on to, a full cycle of the Chinese lunar calendar, their talented successors Sui and Han delivered a dazzling number to the folk classic Bridge Over Troubled Water, earning them top spot. The Year of the Tiger is certainly good to the Chinese figure skaters.
Shen and Zhao were already two of China’s most decorated athletes before winning their Olympic gold. In 2002, they came out on top at the World Championships - again, as the country’s first. Like their pupils, the veterans are also partners in real life, having married in 2007 and given birth to a daughter in 2013.