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Olympics bring Chinese hockey veterans back to the ice

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BEIJING (AP) For decades, Beijing native Zhou Yunjie kept his mother behind the puck over his teenage years.

That all changed after Beijing won the right to host the 2022 Winter Olympics, sparking a government-backed boom in winter sports enthusiasm across the country. The Games start on February 4.

Now the 60-year-old is back on the ice, proudly dressing up with his old teammates for friendlies and retellings of their time in Beijing in the late 1970s.

For years, I couldn’t talk about ice hockey, said Zhou, who owns a technology company in the Chinese capital. Even my family didn’t know… They were so surprised when I went on the ice and showed that I could play hockey.


Zhou is now a regular at competitions on Wednesday and Saturday nights at an ice rink in northeast Beijing. The games have become permanent fixtures in the lives of the hockey veterans who first took up the sport more than 40 years ago as members of an urban youth team.

In the 1970s, they were the stars of more than 200 future hockey players and joined the youth team of the Shichahai Sports School. The famous academy sits next to Beijing’s network of lakes, which regularly draw winter sports enthusiasts to their inviting frozen surfaces.

However, the competition was tough and after five years of professional training, they only managed to finish sixth in the 1978 national competition. A year later, the team was disbanded due to lack of money and public interest.

The players, usually 17 or 18 years old at the time, started a new life as the Chinese economy started to flourish.

Of course we were sad, said Mei Chunhui, 61, who runs a technical consulting firm. We had no idea what to do after that, but we couldn’t help it, so some of us went to college, while others got a job or joined the military.

The hockey flame sputtered out and for over 35 years it looked like they wouldn’t be playing again.

Then, on July 31, 2015, Beijing won the right to host the 24th Winter Games, making the city the first to host both the Summer and Winter Olympics.

Mei became inspired and started calling up his old friends to see if they could get a team back together.

Starting with just nine members in 2015, the team now has more than 20 of its 1979 veterans, most of them in their 60s.

We’ve just started again, Mei said. We have nostalgia for it (and) wanted to come back to enjoy the game.

The team appropriately took the year 1979 as the team name.

Fueled by the Winter Olympics, government, schools and society have fueled enthusiasm for ice hockey, Zhou said. It has also awakened emotions in our childhood that have been lost for many years.

China says it has reached its goal of attracting 300 million people to participate in winter sports, a promise it made when bidding for the Winter Games. The Games’ organizing committee says the country now has 654 standard ice rinks and 803 indoor and outdoor ski resorts.

Despite their enthusiasm, the 1979 teammates feel that the years are catching up with them. Tactics and teamwork now count for more than raw physical strength and fundamental skills, said 62-year-old Yang Xiaoliu.

Winning or losing matters even less, the players say.

What matters to us is the way we enjoy and feel the games,” Zhou said. It’s the way we exchange emotions with each other.”

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