Dalian update: Turtles and runners

Yesterday night on the way to the busstop my eyes fell on a big wooden stand where normally newspapers are being sold. A small crowd had gathered there. On sale were little turtles, paddling in a bowl of water, and tiny orange (!) frogs. Whether they were meant as pets or a meal I do not know. On the other side of the big wooden table was a woman selling eggs. Nothing special were it not that the eggs on display were turquoise in colour. And they were definitely not painted Easter eggs...

On the bus my thoughts went back to the turtles. They reminded me of the legendary army of Ma Junren in the nineties. This controversial Chinese athletics coach propelled x number of very young female long distance runners to the most astonishing feats: olympic, world and Asian titles, smashing several world records along the way. Sometimes with more than one of his athletes at once. Most of these girls were previously unknown and vanished into thin air again after their record runs. 1993 was their finest year. Ma Junren's army swept all the world titles from 1500m to 10,000m during the world championships in Stuttgart, and marched on to destroy all existing world records on the 1500, 3000 and 10,000 metres in Beijing a month later. Seventeen years later, nobody - not even those recent Ethiopian gazelles - has even come close to the times set by the Chinese runners.

So what does this have to do with the turtles that were being sold at the busstop in front of my residence? The famous athletics coach had his main training base here in Dalian, and keeps claiming that his runners' miraculous performances were down to hardcore training regimes (a marathon a day at high altitude) combined with a strict diet of caterpillar fungus, worms and ... turtle blood. Here's my chance to put Ma Junren's elixir to the test! However, I do suspect it won't make me sprint faster to the line but faster to the pot. I also suspect another famous performance booster, abbreviated with three letters, was added to the mix back then. I only wonder who was actually treated with it: the girls or the turtles.

The most successful of Ma Junren's army was a girl named Wang Junxia (photo). For the simple reason she managed to last a few years and even still became olympic 10,000m champion in Atlanta 1996 at the age of 23. She retired afterwards. Wang Junxia was born in Jilin province, just north of Liaoning, but lived for several years in Dalian. In 1993 Wang Junxia smashed records during the Chinese National Games in Beijing nearly day after day. On the 10,000m she took 42 seconds (!!!) off the previous best time, and on the 3000m she needed 16 seconds less. That is unheard of. On the 1500m she was beaten by Qu Yunxia but also went under the world record at the time.

One could thus imagine Wang Junxia to have achieved star and celebrity status here in China, but that somehow does not seem to be the case. At one of the ICD events recently, I chatted with a local woman who claimed to have done athletics as a teenager in the nineties. Even she only had a vague recollection of the multiple world record holder and olympic champion. No idea what happened to her after her career. She seemed to remember she did some teaching here in Dalian. I encountered the same sort of responses from other local people. Qu Junxia, the 1500m world record holder, seems even a bigger mystery. And Ma Junren? The illiterate and previous pig farmer had trouble with his girls eventually, keeping nearly all the prizemoney of his athletes for himself. He made a comeback in 1997 with a new army of runners, but then disappeared from the scene in the late nineties. Some of his athletes were removed from the Chinese National Team for the Sydney Olympics due to suspicious blood values.

Turtle blood, hey ;-)