China Daily Global Edition (USA)
Courting success
Wheelchair basketball player inspires but more commercial help needed, Zhang Zhouxiang reports.
The basketball flew through the air. Dai Jiameng moved her wheelchair with an athletic dexterity before controlling the ball with her right hand and maneuvering by just using her left hand.
She got the ball, made a 60-degree arc turn, dodging those trying to mark her, and seemed to coax the ball into the basket. Net! But no time to waste soaking up the congratulations of her teammates; she turned back and took up her “combat” position.
Dai, 26, has been playing basketball for 12 years.
At the age of 4, an accident resulted in Dai losing her left leg. As a child, Dai’s favorite activity was watching the NBA on TV together with her father. Her favorite star was Dwyane Wade.
She followed Wade’s career closely, including his “wheelchair” game in Guangzhou city, Guangdong province, in 2007, when he was injured.
It was then that Dai got to know that people with impairments could also play basketball, which prompted her to watch the 2008 Paralympics in Beijing.
Yet it was not until 2009 that she realized she could become one of those in the playground. Having got help from the local federation for the physically challenged to make a new artificial limb, she and her father went to collect it.
A staff member noticed that she was in good shape and asked her: “We are recruiting wheelchair basketball players. Are you interested in joining us?”
“I was very happy to hear that question,” Dai says in retrospect. “I asked myself: Why hadn’t I come earlier?”
Silver medals
The year 2009 marked the start of Dai’s basketball career. She found it much more challenging than the sport she watched on TV. The players have to do more. They must first control their wheelchairs with their hands, drive it back and forth with arm strength only and then actually play the game.
It requires extreme patience to master the wheelchair on court and make it not an accessory, but actually an extension.
Dai and her teammates all have calluses on their hands from the hundreds of hours devoted to training.
Chen Xuejing, a player from the Beijing team, says that when she first took up the sport, blisters on her hand “broke and formed again, and again and again, and it’s been very painful”.
But the calluses are nothing compared with the countless injuries they get from the repetitive and combative training.
Wheelchairs are not legs and athletes are often unable to control them fully. Collision and injuries occur.
“If we go through one afternoon of training without injuries, we consider ourselves lucky and celebrate our good fortune,” says Dai.
Furthermore, their training is as intensive as that of regular basketball teams, too.
Since November 2020, the national team has assembled in Beijing and Guangzhou for training.
When the pandemic prevented them from going to Yunnan province to sample the high altitude conditions on the plateau there, they just wore breathing masks to try and simulate the lack of oxygen.
It was through such efforts that the Chinese national wheelchair basketball teams can compete with the best in the world.
The sport first emerged in China in 1984, and was listed as an exhibition sport at the first National Games for Persons with Disabilities, which led to many provincial-level administrative regions founding wheelchair basketball teams.
In 1995, the national wheelchair basketball team made its first foray overseas to participate in the Paralympic selection contest in Tokyo, Japan. In 2016, they ranked sixth at the Rio Paralympics in Brazil.
On Sept 4, 2021, the national women’s wheelchair basketball team, in which Dai was a player, won silver at the Tokyo Paralympics.
Sustainability problem
Yet wheelchair basketball is not exactly prospering in China. There were only nine provincial-level teams at the start of the year, and has dropped further, to eight, when one disbanded in November.
“Lack of spectators is a main problem,” says Chen Qi, coach of the national team. “Without enough people watching it, the sport does not have much commercial value and has to rely heavily upon government funding and donations.”
While normal basketball events can sell their broadcast rights at billions of yuan, the wheelchair version can barely find a TV station to broadcast their matches. Furthermore, there are often so few spectators in the stands that Dai and her teammates are accustomed to playing without applause.
As a result, the provincial-level teams can’t offer an attractive salary for their players. In Guangdong province, for example, the subsidy for players is about 3,000 yuan ($471) a month, which is the national highest.
Then, when wheelchair basketball players retire, the opportunities on offer are far fewer than their counterparts in normal basketball. “The majority of them just leave, so most of our players have to acquire other skills outside the sport in order to find a job upon retirement,” Chen Qi says.
As a result, while the normal national basketball team selects only professional players, the national wheelchair basketball team is open to amateurs, too.
Another reason why they recruit players from the amateur ranks is that they want to encourage more people with physical challenges to participate.
“Wheelchair basketball is more than a competition,” Chen Qi says. “For people with physical impairments, it is a chance to get outside and know that they can make it.”
Chen Qi, the coach, is himself one of them. Over the decades, he has helped to recruit many players for the sport. Lin Suiling from Guangdong provincial team is one. When Lin started playing, she found it very hard to marry the three key elements — playing, controlling the wheelchair, and maintaining balance — and she often fell.
Dai agrees with Chen Qi. “It is after having won the silver medal in Tokyo this year that we got nationwide attention, but the meaning of wheelchair sport is much more than winning medals,” Dai says.
“For me, it is a way of regaining confidence and I hope more people like me can find a way to make themselves known to the world.”