Chinese Race Walkers

Chinese race walker Chen is one in a billion

Clearly what China needs for continued success at race walking is 100 words of Mandarin and a guitar-toting talent.

The strummer playing a happy tune is Olympic champion Chen Ding who followed up his gold medal along The Mall with a fine silver at the IAAF World Championships at Moscow in August.

If anything, his second-place finish in Russia behind hometown favourite Aleksandr Ivanov was more laudable than his London triumph when he became the youngest ever gold medallist in a race walking event at the Olympics.

Plagued by niggling injuries throughout 2013, the native from Hunnan province on the old Silk Road overcame them all to land a second major medal – and he is barely 21.

Overseeing stage one that took him top of the podium in sight of Buckingham Palace was famed Italian coach Sandro Damilano.

The Italian is now ready to launch an assault on the IAAF World Race Walking Cup that takes place in Taicang next May.

In fact, the unlikely pairing of Italy and China has been achieved on 100 ‘technical’ words over the last four years since Damilano was charged with looking after the country’s finest.

The coach’s grasp of Mandarin amounts to a mere ton of words – which is 100 more than every Chinese walker knows of Italian, he reckons, despite spending most winters at Damilano’s Italian base of Saluzzo, south of Turin.

“The Chinese don’t speak a word of Italian, even after all these years of training in Italy,” said Damilano.

“Fortunately, they have a very nice manager who brings them over to Italy and he speaks very good English and we manage to communicate in a third language.”

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