Published : 2024-07-24
Ouvrons Grand les Jeux, Games wide open！
The highly anticipated Paris Olympics will be held from July 26 to August 11. China National teams and Hong Kong athletes are all ready for the game.
The "Our China Story" website has specially launched a Paris Olympics special series, capturing every splendid moment and sharing interesting stories of it.
This article introduces the interesting story of how China got involved with the Paris Olympics as early as 100 years ago.
Who is the first Chinese Olympian?
It has long been recorded that the first Chinese athlete to participate in the Olympic Games was Liu Changchun (劉長春), who competed in sprinting at the 1932 Olympics Games in Los Angeles.
However, what if I told you that the first Chinese Olympian was actually not Liu Changchun, but another Chinese athlete who signed up for tennis competition at the 1924 Paris Olympics?
This year marks the centenary of Paris hosting the Olympics, and a hundred years ago at that international sporting event, China had already made its first debut at the Olympics.
1924 Paris Olympics had 4 Chinese tennis athletes listed
According to the official report of 1924 Paris Olympics, four Chinese names were indeed on the list of athletes in men's singles and doubles tennis, namely Hooi-Hye Khoo (Known as Khoo Hooi Hye, 邱飛海), Shizhang Wu (吳仕章), Sze-Kwang Ng (吳仕光) and Rongluo Wei (韋榮洛).
In other words, these four individuals had successfully registered for the tennis competition at the 1924 Paris Olympics. However, according to the official report of that year's Paris Olympics, they did not actually compete, which means that they did not show up at the Olympic competition.
It is known that all four of them were Chinese students studying abroad, and were well-known tennis players at the time. They had also represented China in international tennis competitions.
For instance, Khoo Hooi Hye, an overseas Chinese from Malaysia, won the men's singles championship in the Malaysia tennis competition in 1923 and from 1925 to 1927; in 1927, he and another tennis ace, Lin Baohua (林寶華), represented China and won the men's doubles championship at the 8th Far Eastern Championship Games.
Rongluo Wei was a well-known tennis player in Hong Kong who represented China in the Far East Games in 1921 and 1923.
In 1924, Rongluo Wei and two other players formed the Chinese tennis team and participated in the Davis Cup tennis competition held in New York, USA, where they played against Australia. This was also the first time the Chinese team participated in the Davis Cup.
Why did these four miss the opportunity to make China's debut at the Olympics? Did they encounter great difficulties?
It's impossible to know now, but it's undoubtedly regrettable.
Liu Changchun represented China in 1932 Los Angeles Olympics
As Wei Rongluo and the other three did not actually attend the 1924 Paris Olympics, four years later in 1932, 23-year-old Chinese sprinter Liu Changchun then became the "first Chinese Olympian" when he stood on the field at the Los Angeles Olympics.
After a 23-day long journey from China to Los Angeles, Liu did not manage to achieve his best domestic best in the Men's 100m and 200m preliminaries, and thus was eliminated.
However, being the first Chinese athlete to appear in the Olympic history, Liu Changchun has realised the Olympic dreams of countless Chinese people.
Read more: Paris Olympics 2024｜Chen Yuxi: determined to win the Diving Championship
Read more: Wu Chuanyu: The first Olympic athlete of New China
