Wu Dan, head coach of China's national BMX freestyle team, said China had increased its efforts to promote the sport in recent years, attributing the recent victory at the Paris Olympics to the combination of domestic training experience and overseas knowledge, as well as the support from national and local authorities.
Chinese athlete Deng Yawen won a spectacular gold medal in the BMX freestyle event at the Paris Olympic Games on July 31.
"After the establishment of the BMX national team, we have not only invited foreign coaches, but also introduced great training know-how from China's other strong sports such as gymnastics, diving, table tennis and badminton. We then combined the domestic training experience with the foreign coaches' Western training methods," Wu told a reporter at a training base in Chengdu City, southwest China's Sichuan Province.
He added that for the success in the Olympics, credit also goes to the fast expansion of BMX facilities across China.
"Many high-level venues have been built for us with the support of government authorities at all levels," said the coach.
Ge Hui, an assistant coach of Sichuan's provincial BMX team and also one of the first BMX freestyle riders in China, stressed the passion and enthusiasm of the athletes, as well as the support from their family members.
"Parents these days are generally very supportive of their children, and the kids are very passionate about BMX. I have the phone numbers of some parents, and they have been in close contact with me to keep an eye on their children's training performance," said Ge.
Coach of Paris Olympics gold medalist explains China's breakthrough in BMX
Shanghai, a leading force for Chinese modernization, is accelerating the pace of building itself into a science and technology innovation center with global influence.
The tech-savvy metropolis is now speeding up the transition from structure building to function strengthening. Taking strengthening the capability of fostering original sci-tech innovations as the main task, it is pursuing both sci-tech innovation and institutional innovation to significantly improve its comprehensive strength in science and technology as well as the overall effects of innovations.
Over the past 10 years since Shanghai began building itself into an international science and technology innovation center, it has reaped fruitful results in sci-tech innovation, which has pushed the metropolis' GDP across the 4-trillion-yuan (about 570 billion U.S. dollars) mark.
In 2023, Shanghai's total research and development expenditure accounted for 4.4 percent of its GDP, and the city's fiscal expenditure on science and technology rose by 36.7 percent to 52.8 billion yuan (about 7.47 billion U.S. dollars).
Driven by science and technology advances, Shanghai's industrial transformation has sped up. The combined scale of the three leading industries of artificial intelligence, integrated circuits, and biomedicine in the city has reached 1.6 trillion yuan (about 226 billion U.S. dollars).
At the National Local Joint Humanoid Robot Innovation Center in Shanghai's Zhangjiang Science City, Qinglong, an open-source general-purpose humanoid robot with a height of 182 centimeters and up to 43 active degrees of freedom, is being trained to pick up oranges.
"After some training, the robot will be able to complete this move by itself when it encounters a similar scenario in the future," said Shi Zhihua, trainer of robot Qinglong.
Thanks to an advanced control software, Qinglong can skillfully perform fast walking, avoid obstacles, go uphill and downhill, and resist impact.
"We plan to build a venue that can simultaneously train 1,000 robots by 2027," Shi said.
The Shanghai Synchrotron Radiation Facility (SSRF), a third-generation medium-energy synchrotron light source facility with 46 laboratories, has been operating around the clock to serve researchers from around the country, whose experiments cover a wide range of fields such as life sciences, materials science and chemical catalysis.
"We are using the SSRF's light to observe the phase change process of this material when it's heated to 1,100 degrees Celsius," said Song Shuang, a PhD candidate of Shanghai Institute of Applied Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
"Our team is developing materials for the energy sector," said Miao Zhikai, a researcher of Tianjin University.
"We are developing cathode materials for sodium-ion batteries," said Li Guodong, a researcher of Fudan University.
Though the laboratories at the SSRF have been running at full capacity, researchers still have to apply for them months in advance, reflecting the vibrancy of innovation in Shanghai.
Shanghai blazes sci-tech frontiers to boost innovation-driven modernization
