I have a million asks in my inbox so I’m going to answer it in FAQ format here.
What exactly happened to Fan Yilin/What did coach Wang do?
AFAIK basically what Valeri did to Katelyn. It has a lot to do with training technique and weight control. The Chinese coaches never quite figured out how to coach bars to power gymnasts, so whenever the gymnast gets heavy, they are unable to get the height they need for release moves or hit their pirouettes. From what I heard, Fan is particularly bad at controlling her weight (not that, in the best case scenario, she needs to) and whenever her weight goes up, her routine pretty much becomes a mess and the more it happened the more extreme the punishment got. (For example, more than one person has told me that coach wang slapped Fan in the face when she got weighed. Also once, she “ran away” and when they found her, she was hiding in the kitchen crying while eating a bowl of cup noodles)
The younger coaches are a lot better at coaching with heavier weights, and the Shanghai team coaches included (they are a “younger” team in general in terms of staff), so when Fan Yilin went back to the Shanghai team after Rio, she thrived under their coaching.
When the initial roaster of coaching teams came out, Fan Yilin broke into tears during a live chat, saying she doesn’t want to go back. (But she didn’t really say anything else.)
AFAIK Shanghai team and sports bureau fought really hard for her (and Mao Yi, who was pretty much Mattie Larsoned at that point) and got them under the coaching team with Coach Zhou on it (the Shanghai team coach).
Is coach Wang going to get fired/punished?
Well, here’s the thing. Keep in mind I’m not making excuses or anything because physical abuse from an adult is not acceptable at all. I’m just trying to explain the cultural aspects and put things in context.
Both my parents beat me up when i fked up as a kid, I remember refusing to practice piano and my mom chasing me around the apartment with a feather duster. It’s just what parents did when they didn’t know better. All of my peers got spanked or at least a slap on the head, save for one kid who was like the typical mild-tempered well-behaved kid who had really mild-tempered parents. The teachers, even during the time I grew up, were expected, by the parents, to strike the students if they were ill-behaved because the parents believed that if the kids are not punished right away they won’t learn their lesson.
In immigrant communities, we often joke about not spanking kids as “white bullshit”, so it’s not that Wang is an anomaly, the whole culture has to change, and I would say that it is slowly changing.
Nowadays Chinese people are more conscious about the right parenting techniques and for the most part, refrain from giving out spanking willy-nilly (but kids still got one if they really fked up and it’s not against the law for parents to spank their kids if they are not otherwise abusive). There used to be very prevalent cultural belief that if there’s no pain, the kid will just forget not to do it or something. (which behavioral psychology has proven wrong) Furthermore, teachers are no longer expected and allowed to give out physical punishment, but coaches in the Chinese system kind of straddle this area between a teacher and a parent/guardian, so they give themselves more liberty and also the court of public opinion used to give them more liberty.
I don’t particularly like coach Wang because I think something is wrong with his coaching technique/pacing that he can’t make a gymnast peak at the right time to save his life (or maybe he’s got his priorities all fucked up that he peaks them at the internal meets) and he’s got a mouth that people wanna rip off (like calling Luo Huang a cripple when she kept getting injured), but he doesn’t exist in a vacuum.
For example, coach bao xianqin and coach sun haiou all have gym fans saying that they’ve slapped or spanked their gymnasts, and coach xiong famously dumped ice cold water on a gymnast who overslept in the morning during winter. Yet, whenever the gymnasts talk about coach xiong they always call him papa bear and are very close with him, and coach Sun famously stood up and fought tooth and nail for Bai Yawen when it’s proposed that she give her BB EF spot to Shang Chunsong during the Nanning worlds: Bai was really inconsistent in training, so much so that they swapped her out and put the more consistent Huang Huidan up during TF (if she was consistent during training, the order would have been Shang, Yao, Bai during TF I think).
Basically, culturally, the Chinese society needs to move away from considering physical punishment from a parental figure as something that’s “for your own good” and part of being a good parent is being strict and making them perform.
I don’t think it’s a particularly “Chinese” problem as we hear similar things from Romania too, but I think there’s a real, observable generation and attitude shift when it comes to physical punishment, and you see me talking about coaches that “mellowed out in their old age” because 1. It is no longer as widely accepted a method of dealing with children and 2. They’ve learned better ways of teaching/coaching.
In a wider societal context, I feel like my generation talks about being spanked by our parents as a child but the current generation are no longer punished in the same way (they have their phones/laptops taken away as punishment now lol) and that it’s really seen as something that the “last generation” did. I think it does speak volumes that the coaches rumored to punish physically are my parent’s age.
Most of the younger coaches I hear doesn’t even control weight as strictly as the older ones and the national team has been making gradual changes like hiring counselors/psychologists for example. I think the hiring of Chow Liang means they are going to increase conditioning etc and move away from the old school way of keeping the gymnasts super lithe and controlling diet to do so.
What I think the chinese national team should improve upon:
I think the coaches need behavioral psychology training and parenting seminars regularly because I can say my parents didn’t know any better when they raised me, but it’s 20-fucking-18 and if they are going to be guardians of young kids they need to learn how to parent. In the Chinese system, they pretty much are the surrogate parents and they should learn how to be a good one.
In the same vein, the national team should help relocate the spouses and children of national team coaches to Beijing so that the coaches themselves know how to be an actual fucking parent. Right now, because the coaches come from all over China, their spouses and children stay in their hometown while they work in Beijing (because of Hukou) and you hear the older coaches talk about how they haven’t went home to see their children in a thousand years. I don’t think it’s acceptable and I think if they haven’t even learned to be a parent to their own children, how can we expect them to be good surrogate parents to others?
More exchanges training camps with the UK or US or other countries that knows what to do with power gymnasts instead of shoehorning into a very narrow technique and then blaming the gymnasts when it doesn’t go well.
Not just the national team but an awareness effort nation-wide about physical punishment being not an effective parenting technique. When it’s no longer acceptable in society to punish children this way, it will no longer be acceptable in the national team or any other sort of sports teams or schools or establishments.
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