国内的报道把好好的一件事吹的天花乱坠的，还是看看这篇英文的吧，比较真实。
From "San Jose Mercury News"
"At any moment, a great moment and this was it"
BY JOE POSNANSKIKnight Ridder Newspapers
TURIN, Italy – The beauty of the Olympics is you never know when that moment
will happen, the moment that will stick with you, the moment when Rulon
Gardner beats an unbeatable Russian or Kerri Strug lands on one leg or Bob
Beamon jumps to the sky or a bunch of hockey-playing American kids beat the
Soviets.
When the Chinese pair – Zhang Dan and Zhang Hao – skated on the ice Monday
night, there was no sign, no hint at all, that this could be that kind of
moment. They were the last couple to skate in the pairs competition, and they
had no chance at all to win the gold medal. That had been clinched by the
Russians, Tatiana Totmianina and Maxim Marinin, the 12th straight Russian pair
to win Olympic gold.
Still, the Zhangs (who are not related) did have a chance to win the first
skating silver medal ever for China. That was not enough to keep some people
from walking out to beat the Italian traffic. The Zhangs started their program
with the throw quadruple Salchow, a move so absurdly tricky that it has never
been completed in competition.
And so the moment began. Hao threw Dan; she spun in the air four times and
tried to land on her right foot. Her ankle turned. She fell into the ice, her
legs split, her knees collided with the ice. Dan slid backward and crashed
into the boards.
The only sound in the Palavela Arena was the Zhang's music - "The Offspring of
Dragons" - still playing while Dan tried to get up. She fell back to the ice.
She pulled herself up again and tried to go on, but instead she doubled over
in pain. Hao skated over to help her across the ice. They had been skating
together since he was 13 and she was 12. The music stopped.
"I thought this is the end," Dan said.
Everyone thought it was the end. Up on the big screen above the ice, they
showed the fall and showed it again and a third time, and each showing
inspired a pained "Ohhhh" from the crowd. At some point, while Dan talked to
her coach and a doctor, Hao turned around to look at the crash for himself. He
winced.
"I have fallen like that, and I was out of commission for a week," former gold
medalist Jamie Sale wrote on her NBC blog.
Dan skated back on the ice. She was hurting in enough places - her left knee,
her left thigh, her right knee - that she did not seem quite sure how to go on
. Hao held her elbows and guided her around the ice, as if she was a child
just learning how to skate. "We were empty in our minds," she would say
through a translator.
She broke away from him, skated around slowly, testing each limb as the cheers
started to build. Then she went back to her coach. She seemed about to quit.
Only then, she took a couple of tissues and wiped away her tears. She went
back on the ice. Afterward, she would be asked again and again how much pain
she felt. Dan refused time and again to answer.
"We are challenging the extreme of a human being," Hao said. "She was doing
four turns in the air. You saw her hit the hit the board. You can imagine the
level of pain."
The music began from the beginning. They skated together, round and round,
anticipating that point in the music where they could pick up the performance.
And then that point hit, and they began skating together, side by side, and
right off they jumped a double axel and triple toeloop, the toughest jumping
combination any pair tried all night. Dan buckled a little bit, but stayed on
her skates.
And they were skating again while the crowd's cheers grew louder and louder.
He threw her for a triple loop - she landed. They spun together. They did
their intricate dance steps together. They rolled through their routine, and
maybe there were flaws in the performance, maybe a couple of buckles, but you
would have to be looking through clear eyes to see them. And nobody had clear
eyes. Tears flooded the arena. Teddy bears and flowers were thrown on the ice.
People blew kisses to this Chinese pair.
"That has to be the most inspiring, phenomenal comeback I've ever seen," Sale
wrote in her blog.
That left only the judging. There's a new scoring system this year, one that
is supposed to take passion more or less out of the equation. But in the end,
figure skating is passion, right? That's why the sport draws the big
television ratings and inspires millions of faithful fans and provokes
millions of others to make fun of it. Figure skating is sweeping music and
glitzy costumes and flamboyant personalities and a million hours of practice,
but mostly it's passion, and the judges did exactly what they had to do. They
scored with their hearts. The Zhangs won the silver medal.
When the announcement was made, applause overwhelmed the arena, and Hao picked
up Dan, held her in his arms as if they were newlyweds about to walk into
their home for the first time. She had a bandage around her thigh and some
sort of ice pack on her knee. She looked dazed. He looked thrilled.
"I'm proud of her for being so brave," he would say.
While he held her, I looked around the arena and realized that everyone in
there, no matter their nationality or age or language, was feeling the same
way: This was it. This was the moment. There's no feeling, none, quite like
being there for that moment, the one that will be remembered. You feel like
the world is spinning around you.
In the stands, there was a section of Russian fans. They were there to cheer
for their skaters and, mostly, to ignore the others. All evening, a large man
wearing a red Russian sweatshirt had led the crowd in raucous cheers, as if he
was conducting an orchestra.
But as Hao held Dan in her arms, the man turned to the ice and applauded. All
the Russian fans behind him stood and applauded too. This is what the Olympics
can be. |
登录
