Gen Zers put their foot forward in a sporting spirit

BEIJING, July 31, 2024 /PRNewswire/ — The second episode of the fourth season of Youth Power, “The Fresh Olympic Spirit of Global Gen Z” was broadcast on July 30. Gen Zers from China, Finland, France, Germany, Greece and the United States gathered in a sports arena and built cross-national friendships through sport. In this encounter, the openness and inclusivity of the sporting spirit was to the fore, as were the innovations, organizational brilliance and technological applications that are all part of staging modern sporting events.

In the Olympics in Paris now on, breakdancing has been added as a Games sport, and skateboarding, surfing and competitive climbing have been retained following their inclusion in the previous Olympics in Tokyo. Stefanie Perner, a Gen Zer from Germany, voiced high expectations for the skateboarding contests. “People used to regard skateboarding as a rebellious sport, or maybe not even sport, just things that kids will do on the street,” she said. “But to me it’s a culture, a community, a way for you to communicate with your cities through your board.”

Emerging technologies such as cloud broadcasting and AI-assisted training are also adding to the spectacle of the Games. Elijah Van Knowles from the United States, who has long practiced wushu at Shanghai University of Sport, said, “From the very university here at Shanghai University of Sports we’ve started going into the deep development of using AI to judge athletes, and it as a way to substitute for human judges.”

The Gen Z guests agreed that technologies should be used in sports in a very discrete way so that the spontaneity and entertainment that are so important to them are not dissipated. Thomas Mattei, a Frenchman studying at Fudan University in Shanghai, said, “Sport is also about spontaneity, and advances are a good part of the Olympics. If you stop (an event) just because the machine says you should, then technology is de-naturing the sport.”

Indeed, the magic of sports lies in their very unpredictability. Anais Fernandez-Laaksonen, a student at Tsinghua University in Beijing who comes from a Finnish family of athletes, said: “People really have a love-hate relationship with sports. There are unpleasant parts, very painful, all the failures and all the injuries. You need to have the perseverance and the bravery to commit to every single decision you make.”

For the Gen Zers in the program, the sporting spirit highlights inclusivity, fair play, solidarity and kindness, encouraging people, in particular the young, to embrace the opportunities of life. Susan St Denis, an American studying at Tsinghua University, said that when she was teaching swimming, children were keen to emulate the US Olympian Michael Phelps, popularly known as the Flying Fish. She then joined a rowing team and was impressed by the women’s rowing in the Olympics in Brazil in 2016.

The host of the episode, Wang Licheng, who studies at Peking University, said, “In the Paris Olympics, for the first time we have the same number of women and men athletes.” St Denis responded, “It wasn’t until 1976 that women were able to compete in rowing at the Olympics. However, even now women athletes do not get the attention they deserve. We don’t get (the same attention) as male athletes do. We don’t get the same amount of coverage.”

The wushu exponent Elijah Van Knowles said wushu holds beauty as an art “not just for fighting people, but also for preserving peace”. He hopes that wushu, with its profound historical and cultural significance, can be included in the Olympics.

Jim Mathiopoulos from Greece, who is studying at Shanghai University of Sport, said he has practiced wushu at his father’s kungfu school since he was young. He dreams of promoting wushu to a wider audience in the birthplace of the Olympics, he said.

“Going into those competitions is not wanting that first place, but for this burning passion and showing what you’ve tried.”

Mathiopoulos is studying Chinese philosophy and history, and says he hopes to bring wushu to the public through online seminars and master classes.

Youth Power, organized by China Daily and first broadcast in June 2021, aims to build a global platform of communication and exchange, focusing on the interests and ideas of Generation Z. The program comes in the form of interviews, forums and speeches, with topics related to anything of current interest in the world.

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