Sports

The Power of Women

• Byline:OSCAR CHUNG
• Publication Date:08/01/2010

A golfer with great ambition, Tseng has already grabbed a second LPGA major title with her win at the Kraft Nabisco Championship in California this year at the age of 21. (Photo by Central News Agency)

Female competitors are by no means the “weaker sex,” as evidenced by the hard work and dedication of three high achievers in different sports.

For golf lovers, the retirement in early May this year of Lorena Ochoa, a Mexican professional golfer who had claimed the world number one ranking since April 2007 until the day she quit the sport, is likely the biggest news in the world of female golfing recently. For Taiwanese people and fans of Yani Tseng, however, this past spring was marked mainly by the extraordinary performance of this 21-year-old golfer from Taiwan at the Kraft Nabisco Championship in Rancho Mirage, California, in early April. The performance secured another important win for Tseng since she turned professional in January 2007. As one big star fades from the golf scene, it seems another one is beginning to shine more brightly than ever.

Earlier in the year Tseng already had won two championship titles, the first at the Taifong Ladies Open in central Taiwan in January and the second at the Handa Women’s Australian Open in Melbourne in March. But the one clinched in California is of greater significance, since it is one of the four major titles on the Ladies Professional Golf Association (LPGA) Tour, a series of tournaments for top-notch female golfers around the world throughout much of the year. This was the second time the Taiwanese player won a major match held by the US-based LPGA, the first time being in June 2008 when Tseng ended up as the winner of the McDonald’s LPGA Championship held in Maryland, making her the second-youngest champion of a major LPGA event in the organization’s history. Taiwan has produced outstanding female golfers in the past, such as Tu Ai-yu, a household name in the 1980s, especially in Japan, where she won a total of 71 championship titles, but certainly Tseng has moved to a higher level on the world stage.

The April win pushed Tseng to number two in the world from number six, although her ranking slipped to number four by mid-June. “I really want to thank Annika Sörenstam,” Tseng said at a press conference after the April match, expressing her gratitude to the former world champion from Sweden, who is both her golfing idol and friend. “She helped me a lot about my game, about the mental [aspect], and she told me to go step by step,” Tseng said.

Yani Tseng at the Honda PTT LPGA Thailand in February this year, where she placed third. The young golfer trained in Taiwan until her late teens. (Photo by Central News Agency)

Tough Training

Training in Taiwan until leaving for the United States in her late teens, Tseng’s achievements certainly also stem from her own ability and dedication, as well as from those who helped her along the road to success, such as her golf-loving parents and Hsu Tien-ya, president of the Sunrise Group, who took an early interest in Tseng’s career and sponsored her training in Taiwan. “She experienced very tough training, which she describes as hell. But she also says that without the hellish experiences, it would have been difficult for her to achieve success,” the entrepreneur says of the golfer’s years of training at Sunrise Golf and Country Club in Taoyuan County, northern Taiwan, which is owned by the Sunrise Group.

Strong ambition definitely is behind the golfer’s determination to get ahead in the sport, as Hsu notes that “both [Tseng] and her father had long set the goal of her becoming a professional and competing in the States,” where the majority of LPGA matches take place.

Already a celebrity in Taiwan and beyond, Tseng hopes that her performance will help the sport develop at home such as by attracting more corporate sponsors, just like the success of golf legend Se Ri Pak, a five-time LPGA major champion, has done for the game in Pak’s homeland of South Korea, which produces many top female golfers today. “Taiwan should hold an LPGA tournament, preferably in Taoyuan because Tseng grew up and trained here. I’ll try my best to make it happen,” Taoyuan County Magistrate Wu Chih-yang said at the golfer’s welcome-home media conference on April 25.

It seems that nothing is impossible when it comes to Yani Tseng, as shown by her inspiring successes to date. “I didn’t even think of winning when I competed in the [June 2008] tournament, but I knew I had a chance to win this time [in April 2010],” the golfer said at the welcome-home media conference. The next goals, Tseng says, are to be world number one and win all four LPGA major titles. By the time Lorena Ochoa announced her retirement in April, the 28-year-old golfer had won two major LPGA titles. With two such honors of her own at the age of just 21, Tseng apparently has a good chance to set some world golf records.

Wu Hui-ju, left, and In Soo Chun, the head coach of Taiwan’s national archery team (Photo by Chang Su-ching)

Similarly ambitious is archer Wu Hui-ju, who currently lives at the National Sports Training Center in Zuoying, Kaohsiung City while preparing for the 16th Asian Games in Guangzhou, mainland China in November. “The gold medal is certainly my goal at the games,” says the 27-year-old archery ace, despite formidable competitors from South Korea and mainland China.

Wu says she got her start in the sport when a teacher selected her for her elementary school’s archery team because she was a “well-behaved child.” But although the sport is unfamiliar to most Taiwanese people, it did not fail to interest the little girl, who found she had a talent for it and was able to make progress and achieve good results in archery contests. She has been active in the sport for nearly 20 years now, and has trained full time at the Zuoying center since 2003. “Practicing archery can be quite boring, especially when you keep getting a low score time and again. But once I start to perform well, the sense of achievement I get keeps me moving forward,” the athlete says.

Like Yani Tseng, Wu began to shine in her chosen arena at an early age. In her mid-teens as a senior high student, she took part in the preliminary screening competition for Chinese Taipei’s 2000 Sydney Olympic Games team, although all the other archers were college students. In the end, however, she did not make the national team. Four years later, though, she made her mark at the Athens Games, winning a bronze medal in the women’s team event with two other Taiwanese archers, the first Olympic medal for Taiwan in women’s archery. In the 2007 Outdoor Archery World Championship held in Germany she went even further, grabbing a silver medal for Taiwan in the women’s team event.

“Wu is the most psychologically stable archer in Taiwan,” says In Soo Chun from South Korea, who took over as head coach for Taiwan’s national team in June 2009 in preparation for the upcoming Asian Games and the London Olympics in 2012. Formerly a coach on the South Korean national team, Chun notes the importance of a calm and highly focused mind in archery, which, he says, partly explains Wu’s rise in the sport. “You can’t tell whether she’s angry or happy during a competition,” he adds.

Precise technique also plays a role in the sport, the Korean coach says, whereas physical power is much less important. “An untrained adult man would find it hard to pull back the bow, but a female archer with good technical skills could easily do so,” he says, adding that performance in this sport has little to do with physical differences between the two sexes. It is no wonder then, as Wu says, that athletes in their 60s and even pregnant women can be seen participating in archery competitions, right up to Olympic level.

Wu, in grey pants, competes at the 2004 Athens Olympic Games, where Taiwan won its first Olympic medal in women’s archery. (Photo Courtesy of Chinese Taipei Archery Association)

Quest for Perfection

Wu says she has made obvious progress in her technique thanks to instruction by the Korean coach. “I used to feel my hand holding the bow was sometimes a bit shaky, although people looking on normally wouldn’t notice,” she says, noting that even a subtle change in body movement can affect her performance greatly. In contrast with Taiwanese archers, she adds, Korean athletes are more technically mature. “They’re like robots,” she says. “A top archer has to be like a robot—perfect in every move.”

Indeed, Korean archers are likely to be the biggest barrier to gold medals for Wu and her fellow athletes at November’s Asian Games. “The competition among Korean archers themselves is quite fierce, which in turn can stimulate each to move forward,” the head coach says of one major difference between the training environment in Taiwan and that in his home country. He further notes that there are at most two female Taiwanese archers that can match Wu’s skill, but in South Korea more than 50 could equal or surpass her.

That said, the Olympic medalist remains hopeful about winning the highest honors in the 2010 and 2012 events in Guangzhou and London. She is also happy to see younger athletes coming up through the ranks to pick up the baton from older ones. In the Republic of China National College Games in May this year, a college archer broke the national record of 664 points in the women’s individual event, which was set by Wu in 2004, by two points. “That means there’s new blood in this field. That’s good for the sport’s development in Taiwan,” Wu says.

Su wins the gold medal at the 2006 Doha Asian Games. (Photo by Central News Agency)

A veteran in the field of taekwondo, Su Li-wen, 29, is by no means less memorable than any Olympic medalist.

For Taiwanese people watching Su on TV as she attempted to fight her way to the podium of the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games, what mattered was the competitive spirit she displayed during the matches rather than the results.

In the first round of the women’s under-57 kilogram event, she suffered torn ligaments in her left knee and a broken toe, losing the battle to a South Korean athlete who later emerged as the gold medal winner. In the following repechage contest, a limping Su beat her rival and moved through to the competition that would decide the bronze medalist, although she had to be carried out of the ring on her coach’s back. Despite being advised to quit at this point, the fighter decided to take up the challenge of competing for the bronze, dropping to the floor time and again during her last contest in Beijing due to the severe pain. In the end, Su narrowly missed taking a medal, but her fighting spirit moved many to tears and she created a moment of glory that few will forget.

“Since I took up the sport, I’ve constantly trained with an injury somewhere in my body, but that time was the most serious,” says Su, now 29, who was hospitalized for three months after being dispatched back to Taiwan immediately after the competition in Beijing. “I’m not sure I can fight like that a second time,” she says of the excruciating pain she endured during those matches two years ago.

Su says she hopes her retirement from competition will be temporary. In the meantime, with the scars left by the surgery on her injured knee as a badge of courage, Su has been instructing the national taekwondo team in technical skills since she was discharged from hospital, becoming the youngest of its eight coaches. “She’s just retired as an athlete, so she has a better understanding of what we need and what we think,” says Jean Liao, an 18-year-old member of the team. “Unlike older coaches who just look on and give oral instructions when training us, she practices with us and therefore knows our weaknesses better,” she adds.

Currently a coach for the national team, Su Li-wen, left, hopes to return to the taekwondo ring as an athlete soon. (Photo by Chang Su-ching)

Back in the Ring

But the athlete-turned-coach hopes the current situation will not last too much longer. “I prefer to be an athlete,” Su says, “I love actually engaging in sports.” In addition, she finds it too tiring to be a coach, given the various duties they must perform, such as taking care of every athlete, attending meetings and writing reports. “It’s physically more tiring to be an athlete, but all I have to do as an athlete is just train myself. And, you know, I train with the athletes when I coach, so I feel tired both mentally and physically,” she says.

According to Su, it is tiring to coach athletes also because they tend to challenge the coach’s authority these days. “I never questioned the orders given by my coaches, however tough the training sessions were, but athletes from the younger generation might ask ‘Why?’ when you want them to do something,” she says. “They also tend to have a weaker will in the face of frustrations. But when top athletes compete with each other, a strong will is the deciding factor in the result.”

The tough training started for Su when she took up taekwondo at the age of 10 with the encouragement of her parents, who hoped the sport could improve the health of their daughter, who seemed to catch colds easily. “I saw my classmates training in the sport, so I joined them. But they quit in the end and I stayed in the sport.”

As a child, “she liked to play with the boys and was quite energetic,” recalls Lee Shan-lung, Su’s first coach, “and she never conceded defeat.” Years of devotion to the sport have made Su a top-notch athlete. After serving as a training partner for national athletes in 1998 at the Zuoying center, she became one the following year. Her career hit its first high note in 2002 when she won a gold medal at the World University Taekwondo Championships. Before Su’s injuries at the Beijing Olympic Games put her career as an athlete on hold, she had grabbed a silver medal at the 2005 World Taekwondo Championships, followed by gold medals at the Doha Asian Games in 2006, the World University Games in 2007 and the Asian Taekwondo Championship in 2008.

Having trained for 12 years at the Zuoying center, which she calls her home away from home, Su is eager to return to the taekwondo ring again as a competitor. “I feel my body is 90 percent back to normal. Anyway I’m trying to ready myself physically, so I can make a comeback whenever my country needs me,” she says when asked whether she will compete in the 2012 London Olympics. Hopefully, this tough veteran will be setting an example of sportsmanship for younger athletes for many years to come.

Write to Oscar Chung at oscar@mail.gio.gov.tw