determination to achieve excellence.
At first sight the gymnasium sitting in one corner of the campus of Gong Jheng Elementary School in Ilan County is not particularly impressive. Children, some as young as five years old, and teenagers are seen turning somersaults or cartwheels or practicing on gymnastic apparatus in the building, with several little boys doing handstands against the wall as a way of punishment for bad behavior.
It is hard to imagine that this gym was, for a while, a magnet for both the media and the just plain curious. The gym, however, shot to fame after a documentary about seven young gymnasts from this school was released early last year. Entitled Jump! Boys, the film was not only a local box office hit, but also won the prize for best documentary at the 2005 Golden Horse Awards.
Gong Jheng has been the only elementary school in Ilan organizing gymnastic teams since 1984, and the gym, which has five coaches, is currently the only venue for training about 50 local gymnasts who are either studying at Gong Jheng or are former Gong Jheng pupils now at local high schools. But it is the seven stars of the film in particular on whom the spotlight has fallen. Six of the boys are on the same team whilst the seventh, who is also the youngest, used to train with the older boys but is now on another boys' team. "The media approached them. Other students of the school saw them as idols," says Lin Yu-hsin, the coach of these two boys' teams, who since last year has also started training girls as well. "They often put on airs at the time. They thought they were superstars. That really annoyed me."
Lin was not happy about the cocky attitude of the gymnasts because he wanted them to move on until his ultimate dream of helping the team win an Olympic medal is realized. Gradually, by constantly disciplining the little athletes for their bloated egos, Lin has brought them down to earth. At the same time, he started to reject invitations irrelevant to the training program such as media demands for interviews with the gymnasts.
Away from the media hype, however, there are solid reasons for the young athletes to be proud of themselves. In 2003 they debuted at the National Gymnastics Championships--a competition for athletes in different age groups--and competed in the category for lower-grade students aged seven and eight. The gymnasts beat more than 10 other teams, winning gold medals in the team and individual all-round competitions, plus 14 other medals in individual events. They proved their victory not to be a mere stroke of luck by retaining the best boys' team title over the next two years. The team had already become well-known in Taiwan's gymnastics circles before the award-winning documentary introduced it to the general public.
"They're supposed to do better than me as gymnasts because they started to practice a couple of years earlier," says coach Lin, 36, himself a member of the school's gymnastic team about 27 years ago. Formerly a gymnast winning gold medals several times at the National Games (a competition for adult athletes only), especially in the vault event, Lin began to train when he was in the third grade. In 2000 he went back to his alma mater to help cultivate prospective athletes. Today he not only trains gymnasts but teaches small children in the kindergarten attached to the grade school to do basic exercises while searching for potential talent among them to take formal gymnastic training. Lin selected six of the seven little gymnasts in this way when they were still preschoolers, looking especially for better physical flexibility and the ability to cope with pressure.
Despite their physical and mental toughness, however, it is impossible for the little athletes to stay on the team without full support from their parents, obtaining which can be a severe test of the coach's persuasive abilities.
The major concern for most parents is that their children may get hurt in training. Some are also afraid that their children will not grow to a normal height if they receive training which, they believe, can stunt growth. But Lin claims that training is less risky than in the past because coaches are more methodical than their predecessors, asking the athletes to make progress step by step.
"In the past, coaches tended to ask athletes to directly imitate foreign gymnasts' more difficult motions. That's dangerous and inefficient," he says. As to the height issue, Lin says this is a fallacy. While top gymnasts do tend to be shorter than average, this is because a naturally shorter stature gives an advantage in the sport, not because training stunts growth.
Lin says the parents of the gymnasts take a rather positive attitude toward the sport. "Most children these days are glued to the TV or computers while at home. They just don't have the time to develop interpersonal relations," said Huang Jheng-ming, father of one gymnast, explaining his supportive attitude toward his son's place on the team. For him, the tough gymnastic training also helps form healthy character. "My father dotes on him a lot because he's the oldest grandson. Joining the team should prevent him from becoming spoiled," he says.
With Taiwan's young people being dubbed the "strawberry generation" in analogy with this soft and easily bruised fruit, the little athletes are breaking the stereotype. "It's good for people to learn how to face challenges and pressure at an earlier age," says Huang Shu-fen, whose child is also on the gymnastics team. "Through the training I hope my son will have something to remember in his childhood and grow to be a person who doesn't give up easily when facing difficulties."
The boys' performance has not been disappointing. They have won applause, built self-confidence and developed a love for the sport. "I want to practice gymnastics because I want to win. If I don't do so continuously, I could lag behind," says Sie Siang-syuan. "If you rest for a few days, your muscles get stiff and you'll yell when the coach stretches your body to make it lithe," his brother, the youngest of the seven boys, chimes in.
All the boys have shed tears in the early stages of the training when they endured physical pain induced by the coach's effort to "soften" their bodies. There were times when the athletes thought of quitting and some actually stopped training for days. But they persisted in the end. "The toughest days are over," Lin says. Today they still have to do stretch exercises every day at the start of the daily training between 2 p.m. and 7 p.m. but no one dreads it anymore.
It was this degree of perseverance that goaded the coach's brother, Lin Yu-hsien, to make a documentary about the team when he returned to his hometown in 2002. "At first I wasn't very interested. I thought the story wouldn't be juicy enough," he recalls. "But those children really surprised me. I witnessed the little boys crying like hell out of pain but saw them coming back to the gym the next day." After that, he decided to spend some time filming the team whenever he came back to Ilan. Ending with a recording of the team's performance at the 2004 National Gymnastics Championships, the film finally catapulted the boys and the coach to fame across Taiwan.
"I decided to shoot the film partly because I wanted to use it to encourage people to stay in Taiwan's declining movie industry," Lin Yu-hsien says. The director is apparently not the only one that was touched by the courage with which the children coped with frustration. A commercial success, the documentary has been shown in 100 elementary schools with sponsorship from the Ministry of Education and Amway Taiwan; to this day Lin Yu-hsien is still invited by various organizations to show his film to their employees and members. The Lin brothers and the gymnastics team traveled to Tokyo for the film's first commercial showing abroad in June.
The director hopes he can produce another documentary Jump! Men in 2012 that ends with the team competing in the London Olympics or, even better, with its members standing on the medal podium. Taiwan's gymnasts have won medals at international contests like the World Gymnastics Championships and Asian Games, but an Olympic medal still looks remote.
The coach hopes his boys can make the breakthrough. Already he is seeing good signs, especially after his brother helped bring the team closer to their ultimate goal. Thanks to the success of the documentary, the coach now has a greater ability to bring in financial aid from local companies. "Now I not only act as a coach but have to think up ways to raise money for the team's development," Lin Yu-hsin says. His plan for the boys is to send them abroad to compete in as many international contests as possible when they get into their mid-teens, which means he will need much more money. "The quality of athletes themselves is important. But it's also important to let international judges remember them as well," Lin says. "For gymnasts at the same level, those more familiar to the judges often get higher points."
All the gymnasts on the team from the Gong Jheng Elementary School expect to be trained under Lin after they go to high school in Ilan. The real problem will come when they are old enough for university, which may take them away from Ilan and coach Lin. To deal with this, National Ilan University will offer admission to outstanding gymnasts next year, so that the adult gymnasts can stay in their hometown and be trained by coaches who have known them since childhood. A department of competitive sports, which will recruit promising athletes, is being planned at the same time.
Meanwhile, a new gymnasium is slated for completion in Ilan by the end of this year. Lin Yu-hsin believes that the attention on his team from around the island has helped facilitate the building of the gym that started three years ago. More spacious and better equipped, the new gym is expected to enhance the safety and efficiency of training.
Nobody knows whether these boys, who are still so young, can really make history at the Olympic Games and enable Lin Yu-hsien to create a perfect ending to his planned documentary. But at least they have greatly encouraged hundreds of little gymnasts training in Taiwan's elementary schools as well as people in every walk of life. "It's more and more difficult to recruit new gymnasts. More and more people choose to be childless. If they want children, they want one or two. So parents are more protective than before," says Wang Yuan-hong who was Lin Yu-hsin's coach and is still teaching at Gong Jheng Elementary.
Considering the old coach's words, few can feel unmoved by the little gymnasts' determination to jump high and far with courage and grace.