Onetime ‘pride of China’ suiting up for Canada
DAWN WALTON
From Saturday’s Globe and Mail
July 5, 2008 at 1:07 AM EDT
EDMONTON — If this were any other Olympics, in any other place, Jujie Luan wouldn’t have bothered.
Twenty-four years have passed since the fencer struck gold in the foil event for China at the Los Angeles Games, eight since she retired from competition. She has a husband and three children in her adopted home, Edmonton, and next week she hits the milestone 50 – old enough to be a grandmother to some Olympians.
Yet she has spent thousands of dollars, taken months off work and travelled the globe to claw her way back up the international rankings – all to make the Canadian Olympic team and qualify for her fourth Games.
She has a ready explanation, direct and undeviating.
“Because it’s in China, that’s why I’m trying,” she says. “If not in China, then I’m not trying.”
Ms. Luan – the grand dame of fencing, the old lady of foil once described to Canadians as the Gordie Howe of China – is not alone in making the Olympic pilgrimage home.
A contingent of Canadians who will be competing in table tennis, shooting and swimming next month also have Chinese roots. Ms. Luan says she is proud of her homeland, and visits often, and wanted to take part in China’s grand introduction to the world. And she – along with athletes such as NBA star Yao Ming – will generate an unprecedented frenzy when she arrives in Beijing.
It has been an epic journey, now coming full circle.
Born to a family of seven children, Ms. Luan didn’t take up fencing until she was 16, late for the sport requiring early-honed finesse. But within a year she was on the country’s national team and started racking up an impressive string of victories.
By the time she was 20, she’d reached legendary status with a gutsy performance at the world junior championships. Ms. Luan, a rare southpaw in fencing, was stabbed by her opponent, the foil snapping off in her left arm, just under the bicep. (In foil, the fencer gets hits when he or she strikes the torso of the opponent with the point of the blade. A metallic vest registers successful hits with an electric pulse.) But Ms. Luan fought through the pain to earn a silver medal. It was a feat that, combined later with her Olympic gold – China’s first Games medal in the sport – fixed her place as a national treasure, with her face on a stamp, her name on T-shirts, her story told in textbooks and on film.
Her move to Canada came after participating in the World University Games in Edmonton in 1983. She fell in love with the city and, by 1989 – a year after competing for China at the Seoul Olympics – Ms. Luan moved to Edmonton to study English as well as to compete and coach.
In 1994, she received Canadian citizenship and was part of the Canadian Olympic squad at the 2000 Games in Sydney. But she lost in her first match and returned to Alberta to settle into life as a married mom and head coach, nurturing the Edmonton Fencing Club into the biggest fencing facility west of Toronto with hundreds of members, including two of her own children.
On a recent weeknight, Ms. Luan’s son, Daniel Gu, 10, is playing with some equipment in the gym as his mom coaches. He says he expects she will be in demand for interviews once she gets to China. Ms. Luan’s daughter, 14-year-old Jerrica Gu, who is moving her way up the fencing ranks and could well qualify for London in 2012, is quietly complaining about spending two months this summer in China. Ms. Luan’s eldest child, Jessica Gu, 17, who has Down syndrome, is also milling around the club.
For all her celebrity in China, Ms. Luan is barely recognized in Canada – except in the confines of the fencing world. But during a break from teaching, she says she has already reached her goal.
When she hits the half-century mark on July 14, she will depart for Nanjing, where she grew up, to train and visit with friends and family, before participating in an unparalleled coming-out party for her homeland.
“I’m dreaming. I’m 50 and I am going to Beijing Olympic Games. I made it already,” she says. “Top three. Medals. It doesn’t make a difference.”
She refers to herself as “old” or “too old” nearly a dozen times while talking about her long road to Beijing. At her age, she says, she would never make the Olympic team in China, where there are so many more young and talented fencers.
She also mentions her dodgy knee, acquired after slipping at a ski hill in Banff. She is prone to tendonitis in her left elbow. And she says her body takes longer now to recover from stress and injuries.
When the world learned in 2001 that Beijing would play host to the 2008 Games, Ms. Luan thought, “My God, that’s too old,” she says, meaning she’d be too old. “I think I’ll never make it.”
But in December of 2006, teammate Igor Tikhomirov, a Russian national champion who has been in Canada for 12 years and will also be competing for Canada in Beijing, convinced her to make a run at the Games.
By the spring of 2007, she was travelling to Seoul, Shanghai and Tokyo for competitions, but was performing badly, earning no points – the key in improving an athlete’s ranking. Media initially drawn to the allure of a dramatic comeback-turned-homecoming quickly lost interest.
But she found her stride at North and South American competitions, gaining points and jumping up the rankings after matches in Argentina, Cuba, Las Vegas and Quebec. She climbed from no individual standing to somewhere in the 400s to now 44th in the world – the highest-ranked Canadian woman in foil.
Olympic qualification guidelines are complicated, but at the Games, the higher the ranking generally means facing less skilled competitors in the early rounds. And the Canadian Fencing Federation, she says, wasn’t making it any easier for her, requiring her to train in Quebec.
“They said, ‘You have to. That’s the rule. You have to go to Montreal for training. If you’re not coming, you’re off the team,’ “ she recalls.
With bills to pay and a family in Edmonton, she thought about quitting, but her husband, Dajin Gu, told her: “No, no, no. I think once you start, you can’t give up. You better keep going, don’t worry about it. You better move to Montreal.” She describes him lovingly as her “house husband” who looks after things at home, especially when she is away training and competing.
So she moved to Montreal. She also went to Europe for two months to compete on the circuit there – a journey fuelled largely by her family’s line of credit. Ms. Luan doesn’t want to count exactly how much her Olympic dream has cost, but she has received a few thousand dollars raised by donors at her club and several thousand more in support from her national sport association.
Danek Nowosielski, a three-time Olympian and now high-performance director with Canadian fencing, says there’s still a funding bias in Canada toward winter sports over summer ones.
Between 2005 and 2007, the Canadian Olympic Committee funnelled only $162,000 to the fencing federation. In 2007-2008, Sport Canada injected $634,906 into the federation. But that compares with more than $2.6-million Ottawa gave that year to rowing, and nearly $4.5-million to alpine skiing, and more than $2-million to curling.
What’s more, Mr. Nowosielski says, funding is largely based on performance. And the best Canada has ever done in fencing at the Olympic level is fourth – in Los Angeles in 1984 and again in Athens in 2004 – both times in team events. An individual Canadian has never placed higher than 10th.
When funding is thin, only athletes with the best prospects for medals get the most money, and whatever is left over trickles down. That’s why competitors such as Ms. Luan end up footing some of their own bills.
“It’s a great story for her, for sport, for fencing and we’re milking it for everything we can,” he says. “But at the same time, the system demands performance and if you don’t have the performance, if we just send athletes to go to the Olympic Games and they go, then very soon the money dries up even more.”
As Ms. Luan works with one of her students, she lunges with the flexibility of a teenage gymnast. As she jogs around the fencing club with young athletes to warm up, she barely huffs a breath. And as she talks about these historic Games, she doesn’t have a twinge of regret about competing for Canada, not China.
“I think making this Olympic Games is good for sport. It doesn’t matter for country – China or Canada – it’s just very good for sport,” she says.
So far, she’s already proven she still has the strength and technique to compete with the world’s best. And time hasn’t stolen her competitive spark.
“I’ll go to Beijing and do my best. It’s not easy. For my age everybody says, ‘You’ve qualified for it, you’ve already win,’ “ she says. “I still have to try. I will try.”
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