Family members, teachers and students at former schools of the members of the Chinese artistic swimming team gathered to watch them compete at the Paris Olympics on Wednesday, where they claimed China's first ever gold medal in the team event.
At the Dazhou Sports School in southwest China's Sichuan Province, where swimmers Xiang Binxuan and Xiao Yanning were students, teachers, current students, as well as Xiang's parents and brother, watched the event together.
The team event consists of three parts - team technical, team free and team acrobatic.
The nine-member Chinese team took the lead in the first two routines in the team technical and team free to enjoy a 69.42-point advantage ahead of the second-placed United States.
With a routine called "Light of Life," they scored 283.6934 points in the team acrobatic for a record-high of winning total of 996.1389.
Their performance was greeted with cheers and applause in the room.
"I cry every time I watch her games, because I'm so nervous as soon as I see her. I think the coaches have trained her really well, and she herself is really good. She has realized her dream because of her hard work and dedication," said Wang Ying, Xiang’s mother.
"Xiang Binxuan and Xiao Yanning displayed outstanding skills in this contest. They have been training hard for a long time, so they deserve this result," said Li Guoquan, a swimming coach at the school.
At Shenzhen Sports School in the southern province of Guangdong, where twins Wang Liuyi and Wang Qianyi were pupils, their parents, enlightenment coach and athletes at the school also gathered to watch the event. They burst into deafening cheers as the girls clinched the gold medal.
"I'm very happy and excited that they have realized their long-cherished dream on this Olympic trip. It has long been their dream to compete at the Olympic Games and stand on the podium together to win glory for our country," said Wang Huiqi, father of the twins.
"I feel happy and proud of them. Hope they win again in the following duet routines," said the twins' enlightenment coach Hu Lianghui.
China earned its first artistic swimming medal - a bronze medal in the team event - at the Beijing 2008 Olympics, and won silver in the team event and bronze in the duet at London 2012. China has won two silver medals in the artistic swimming competitions at the past two Olympic Games.
In the World Championships, China topped the podium for the first time in the free combination event at Budapest 2017.
The artistic swimming duet routines will take place on August 9 and 10.
Family members, teachers and students celebrate Chinese artistic swimming team's gold
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
