Don’t stop, move forward.

1

In 2019, Wang Meng returned to Northeast China, taking 75 gold medals with him. When he went through the security check, the staff was shocked, "Why did you get so many?"

< p> She and those gold medals flew to Harbin and traveled eastward along the Harbin Expressway for more than 400 kilometers to the end of the wind and snow, the small town of Qitaihe.

It is an extremely remote place in Heilongjiang, the end point of many railways. There is a championship hall in the center of the small town. Wang Meng’s gold medal is placed on the 4th floor. There is an observation hall above, and you can see the ice lake gliding quickly in the distance. young man.

On the second floor of the Champions Hall, there is a bronze statue. His name is Meng Qingyu. He is Wang Meng’s teacher, the godfather on the ice, and a legend in this city.

When he was 18 years old, Meng Qingyu came to Qitaihe from Harbin and went to mine with many educated youths to dig coal. The name of the mine was "Shengli", which seemed to be God's will.

He walks 6,000 meters up the slope every day, and goes skating on the Yehe River in his spare time. The sound of music and lights in Harbin are as distant as a dream, but in his arms he carries the skates that the teacher stuffed into him, "Don't give up skating no matter how troublesome it is." ".

He won the championship in the mining area, but the times gave him limited tracks. At the age of 23, he became the first batch of skating coaches in the small town.

He went around primary schools, picked out more than 20 children, and deceived their parents one after another, saying, "If you can become a world champion, you can become a physical education teacher even if you don't."

The amateur youth speed skating team was established. The training location was a puddle on the outskirts of the city, with the north wind howling on the ice and lush grass all around.

Winter nights are long in Qitaihe, and teenagers often get up early to train in the dark.

Many years later, Yang Yang’s coach Dong Yanhai recalled that one day the teenagers came to the puddle and suddenly found a wooden pole standing in the field, with an iodine tungsten lamp hung on the wooden pole, and Meng Qingyu stood under the lamp. There is a small warm light on the wilderness.

Over the past few years, the teenagers wandered through many puddles and finally settled at the old stadium in the city. The stadium is equipped with electric lights and is called a lighted stadium by locals.

The illuminated stadium was simple and empty, and Meng Qingyu built a room under the stands as a dormitory for the speed skating team. The dormitory was drafty and the walls were covered with frost.

After winter, Meng Qingyu got up at midnight every day, wrapped himself in a cotton coat, pulled up an iron sledge, and went to a distant place to fetch water.

There is an iron bucket on the iron sledge, which can hold more than half a ton of water. After it is full, Meng Qingyu pulls the sledge back to the stadium and pours ice in circles.

The ice needs to be poured during the coldest night, and it takes two hours to pour the ice.

After the watering, Lao Mengru wore ice armor and made a clattering sound when he walked. He had to hit it with a wooden stick before taking off his clothes.

After dawn, the teenagers walked onto the ice rink and skated in circles until late at night. Sometimes they skated until their whole bodies were frozen. Meng Qingyu carried them back to the dormitory one by one.

In the dormitory, he spoke seriously about the slogan he had heard, "Out of Asia, Go to the World." The teenagers laughed at his bragging.

The girl Zhao Xiaobing said to him, "Don't try to lie to me, skating can't participate in the Olympics." For miner children, the Olympics are too far away, and Harbin is the end of the world.

In the summer, there was no venue, so Meng Qingyu took them to simulate training. The teenagers used long belts to tie themselves around the waist in the tree, and stepped sideways on the ground, imagining walking on the ice and snow.

Later, Meng Qingyu organized bicycle training. They started from Qitaihe and rode hundreds of kilometers a day, covering most of Heilongjiang in half a month.

One time, while riding, the teenagers discovered that he was missing. When they turned back to look for him, they found that he fell in a ditch, with blood flowing across his elbow and exposing his bones.

In 1985, 12-year-old team member Zhang Jie traveled far and wide to compete and won five gold medals in the national speed skating youth group. The whole audience was in an uproar. The coaches and commentators looked over the map, looking for the Qitai River.

These five gold medals changed the fate of the teenagers, and Meng Qingyu was allowed to lead the team to Harbin for training.

When the teenagers walked into the 8,000-square-meter skating hall of the Sports Commission, with bright lights and constant air conditioning, it was "like walking into heaven."

Because it is an amateur team, the teenagers can only play after the provincial team has finished practicing. The skating rink has two times, 5 a.m. and 11 p.m.

After skating every night, Meng Qingyu handed the janitor a cigarette and begged him to turn off the lights an hour later and skate a little longer.

When he was in Qitaihe, after training, Meng Qingyu would take the teenagers on night walks and jump on glaciers to strengthen their minds.

He said that no matter what kind of opponent he faces, as long as his legs do not tremble, an athlete should first be a hero.

2

In 1985, a 10-year-old girl named Yang Yang joined Meng Qingyu’s team.

Yang Yang was thin and was rejected by the sports school, but Meng Qingyu liked her stubbornness. On the dark ice rink before dawn, Yang Yang fell at the end and never gave up.

The stubborn teenagers sprinted hard, unaware of their fate. In 1987, Meng Qingyu strongly recommended the leadership and hoped that Qitaihe would specialize in short track speed skating.

The superficial reason is that it is a new project that can bring out surprise troops, but the real reason is that there is no larger ice channel in Qitai River. In 1992, short track speed skating officially became a Winter Olympic event.

Time just slipped into the 1990s, with endless wind and snow, coal ash falling and rising, the joy of the Northeast suddenly stopped and reached a confused intersection, and there were fewer and fewer children skating.

Meng Qingyu’s apprentice, Zhao Xiaobing, who is now a coach, came to the door with gifts to persuade parents, but most of them did not want their children to practice sports. More young people leave to study and never come back.

Everything decays in time. Half of the former illuminated stadium collapsed, and it was as lonely as the Colosseum in ancient Rome. There were overgrown grasses between the runways. The open space was converted into a scrap collection station, and later it was turned into a passenger terminal logistics yard.

Meng Qingyu took the remaining teenagers to Harbin for training and rented an underground garage.

He hired a carpenter to build a loft in the garage. The girl slept on the upper floor, and the coach and the boy slept on the lower floor. It was crowded. Hot flashes in the summer bring sores to many people.

Meng Qingyu was a coach, a purchaser, a cultural teacher, and a cook. Later, when he was too busy, Yang Yang’s mother volunteered to come to Harbin to cook for the children and worked there for three years.

When he was most embarrassed, Meng Qingyu borrowed 30,000 yuan from Wang Meng's father. Many years later, Wang Meng recalled, "That was all my family's wealth at that time."

Wang Meng joined the youth team in 1995. She was 10 years old at the time. She had short hair, was domineering and loved to fight. She felt great on the ice, could dodge and change directions, and was extremely agile.

Meng Qingyu was extremely fond of her, but he never looked down upon her in person. Every time Wang Meng was lazy, he was punished by being forced to circle the ice rink 100 times.

After running sixty laps, Wang Meng stayed still, but Meng Qingyu never compromised. He ran from early morning to noon and had to complete a hundred laps.

Once when Wang Meng went to a small supermarket and ate some snacks on credit, Meng Qingyu slapped him down and called Wang Meng's father to come. The two teamed up to intimidate and fined Wang Meng 500, which scared Wang Meng to the point where he no longer dared to eat snacks.

With the 500 yuan, Meng Qingyu later bought Wang Meng a down jacket.

In those years, Meng Qingyu created an original method of gradually increasing physical fitness, and the teenagers had to exercise more than 20,000 meters in each class. When he grew up, Wang Meng said that because he had a good foundation as a child, he was able to withstand heavy training loads.

Every early morning in the cold winter, at 4:20, Meng Qingyu regularly wakes everyone up. The teenagers call this "freezing point".

When running laps, they had a "love-hate relationship" with Meng Qingyu, but they could understand the painstaking efforts. Children in the mining area have been wild and fearless since they were young, and they also climb mountains in their dreams.

In 1995, when Yang Yang won the World Championships, Wang Meng was full of admiration in front of the TV. Meng Qingyu said lightly: She was not as good as you when she was a child.

Not long after the Asian Winter Games, Meng Qingyu took Wang Meng and others to watch the game. Wang Meng successfully asked Yang Yang to sign an autograph. For the first time, she realized that she was so close to the world of champions.

Those champions who walked out of Qitaihe have developed a tradition over the years. When they return to Qitaihe, they will skate with the juniors led by Meng Qingyu, and then deliberately fall behind to make the teenagers feel that the championship is not out of reach.

In 2006, in Turin, Italy, Wang Meng won the gold medal, ushering in the Mongolian era. At the next Winter Olympics, she won the three short track speed skating 500-meter, 1000-meter, and 3000-meter relay championships.

In the year when Wang Meng won the gold medal, an old friend went from Harbin to Qitaihe to visit Meng Qingyu.

The years were long and fleeting. The two of them drank a bottle of Laobaigan, and Meng Qingyu shed tears like rain.

Three

Outside the ice rink, Meng Qingyu has no hobbies. He sharpens his skates in his spare time. He sharpens his experience until he writes a paper and publishes it. He sharpens it to the point where all the experts in the province hire him if the skates don’t fit. tune.

In 1997, Qitaihe asked him to go to Shanghai to attend a conference. It was actually a disguised incentive trip. He came back after attending the conference and used the money he saved on travel to buy a knife sharpener worth 20 yuan. Whetstones, distributed among the youngsters.

After Yang Yang won the championship, other provinces and cities offered him an annual salary of one million yuan to poach him, but Lao Meng refused. He was as stubborn as a small town.

Local parents joked, "Generations of idiot coaches have led them, and generations of idiots have followed them. We parents have also become stupid, so let's just follow along."

One winter, Meng Qingyu fell in love with the students of his apprentice Zhao Xiaobing. No matter what she wanted, Zhao Xiaobing would not give them to her: You are so old, why are you trying to steal students from me?

The old man stood at the school gate and cried: "Xiao Bing, if you don't let me take care of the students, what's the point of my life?"

In 2003, Fan Kexin became one of Meng Qingyu’s students. Her family was poor, and her brother repaired shoes after dropping out of school to support her skating.

She needed new skates for training and she couldn’t afford them. Meng Qingyu spent 2,500 yuan to buy them for her and told her that hard work can change her life.

On August 2, 2006, Meng Qingyu drove a van to Harbin to attend a training session. Before departure, he said that Fan Kexin was malnourished and wanted his retired wife to go to Harbin to take care of the children.

At 9:07 a.m. that day, Meng Qingyu died in a car accident at kilometer 458 of the Hartong Highway, leaving behind an old sports suit, a cracked Nokia, and a stopwatch.

After the tragedy, leaders and the media rushed to Meng’s home to offer condolences. In the small room of 40 square meters, there is no decent furniture except a TV.

Meng Qingyu’s wife moved out several folding chairs from the bedroom, which she bought when they got married.

On the day of the funeral, the whole town was in mourning. Thousands of citizens saw him off. The grown-up teenagers kowtowed in front of the photos and burst into tears.

People on the ice did not want to forget him, and the final report meeting about him went all the way to the General Administration of Sports.

The disciples came on stage one by one, and their stories were always interrupted by crying.

After Wang Meng came to the stage to speak, he was full of regret and said with tears: If Coach Meng can hear it in heaven, I want to say sorry to him.

She always thought that the coach was harsh to her because he didn't like her. After the car accident, her father told her that it was a planned method of motivating the generals and that she was actually Meng Qingyu's favorite disciple.

The athletes in the audience listened silently. Lin Dan, who plays badminton, said that he originally came just to "go through the formalities", but his eyes turned red when he heard, "I am not a girl, I can't cry... I have to seize every opportunity, every training, every game."

Two years later, a film crew came to Qitaihe to shoot the movie "Ice Breaking" based on Meng Qingyu.

The small town only has snow and gray, only black and white. They pan the camera and reverse the time, restoring ideals, loneliness and purity bit by bit.

The director said that Meng Qingyu is not a hero or a model. He is first of all a human being. "Some people only do one thing in their lives, and he is such a person."

After Meng Qingyu left, his disciples took over the coaching, and it has been passed down to the fourth generation. Zhang Jie, who he first led, returned from Japan and formed the Special Olympics speed skating team in a small town.

She said that when she was in Japan, she could always dream of Meng Qingyu calling her: Get up, line up, and train.

In 2013, Qitaihe finally had an indoor ice rink. Athletes from Qitaihe have won 173 world-class competition gold medals, 535 national gold medals, and broken world records 15 times. One-fifth of the 1,730 registered short track speed skating athletes are from Qitaihe.

On the first floor of the championship hall, instead of gold medals, there were thousands of pairs of skates whose blades had been polished by teenagers. That’s where championships start.

On February 5, Meng Qingyu’s last disciple Fan Kexin and his teammates won the first gold medal in the Winter Olympics.

After winning the championship, she said that she hoped that more Qitaihe children could follow my example.

On the night of the championship, the sound of firecrackers filled the night sky of the small town, trying to dispel the chill.

The permanent population of Qitaihe is less than 700,000, down from 230,000 10 years ago. Hegang in the distance is frequently in the news because of property prices, while the entire Northeast is still in the snow.

Some people left, some lay down, and some gritted their teeth and marched.

On the vast ice surface of Heilongjiang, there are always people digging into the ice for winter swimming in winter.

The ice is as thick as rocks and the water is bitingly cold. But what gives people confidence and hope is gritting their teeth and swimming on.