Female Grandmaster—Hou Yifan

Even by the standard of chess geniuses, Hou Yifan stood out. It wasn’t so much the way she played the game     1     with an aggressive but flexible style. It was that she was a girl. Thirteen years after she became a Grandmaster, at the age of fourteen, people still mentioned two big hairpins that used to pin back her bobbed hair. “I never felt     2     or limitations,” she told me recently from her home in Shenzhen, China, where she is a professor at Shenzhen university’s Faculty of Physical Education.

“My parents never told me that as a girl you should do this or that,” she said. “Teachers never shaped my views in that way.” These days her hair falls to her shoulders and black cat’s-eye glasses frame her face. She speaks English quickly and     3    . She is the only woman among the hundred best chess players in the world.

Chess is not like basketball or soccer. Men and women face one another on equal terms, and no one can tell the     4     of a player from the moves on a scorecard. Still, of the seventeen hundred and thirty-two Grandmasters in the world, just thirty-eight are women. Much of this gap stems from how many women compete versus the number of men who do: around sixteen percent of tournament players are     5     as female and most of them are children. As a purely     6     matter, you would expect few, if any, women at the extreme of the rankings. Still, this appears to be an incomplete explanation of the inequality at the top of the game, about which Hou is     7    . “You cannot deny it, you cannot pretend it doesn’t happen,” she told me, of the absence of women from chess highest echelon(梯队). For years, she has been the only one who stood a chance.

Hou was born in 1994 in Xinghua, a small city near China’s coast. As a child she     8     a chess set in a shop window and liked the shapes of the pieces. When she was five, she started playing the game with other kids at the home of a chess teacher and showed enough talent that her parents     9     her a year early in the local school which had a chess program. She and her classmates would consult a large chess dictionary and write out the first few moves of famous openings on a sheet of paper. Then they would set up their boards, dutifully     10     their copied instructions and launch their wild attacks.

She moved to Shandong with her mother and attended chess classes. Two years later, she joined the national team and won the girls under ten championship in 2003. In the next year, she finished boys under ten tournament tied for first.

Japan's Prime Minister and the International Olympic Committee agreed to postpone the Summer Olympics until 2021 because of the coronavirus outbreak.

The decision, announced Tuesday, has    1    ramifications for the sports world as well as for NBC, the network that has become synonymous with the event.

The Olympics, which were scheduled to take place from July 24 to August 9 in Tokyo, are both a global athletic competition and a major television event in which NBC and its parent company, Comcast (CMCSA), are heavily invested.

NBC has    2    every summer Olympics since 1988. Postponing this year's games disrupts multiple pans of NBC, from its ad revenue business to the promotion of Peacock, the, network's new     3    service. “This is significant to NBC because They've built their    4     around it. They're the network of the Olympics, said Jay Rosenstein, a former vice president of programming at CBS Sports. "The peacock is intertwined with the rings.” Rosenstein added that nearly every part of NBC is    5    with putting together the games, including its sports, news and cable divisions.

Japanese PM and IOC chief agree to postpone 2020 Olympics until 2021. "This is much more than just a two-week    6    for them. They have to prepare for it for years. Pausing and restarting it is a big challenge, Rosenstein told CNN Business. 'It's also a(n)     7    challenge because the Beying Winter Games in 2022 would likely only be six months later now."

Patrick Crakes, a media consultant and former Fox Sports executive, said that the Olympics are a “top-five investment for Comcast." "Every two years the whole company goes all in to present one of the world's unifying premiere events,” M Crakes told CNN Business, Ulf’s    8    to turning around an aircraft carrier to do all this again next year.

The games are a huge advertising and ratings    9    . NBC Sports announced that it exceeded $1.2 billion in ad sales for the upcoming Olympics - a new record for the games.

Brian Roberts, Comcast’s CEO, said earlier this month that he was "optimistic" that the Olympics would lake place as scheduled, but added that the company is    10    if the games are interrupted or canceled by the outbreak.

It was very hot outside. The Chengdu Little Warriors were facing off against the Legendary Mighty Dragons of Beijing at a local indoor skating-rink (溜冰场). When I arrived, the Little Warriors, whose oldest player was eight years old, had just     1     their northern competitors. Near the lockers, a poster advertised hockey classes. Olympic     2     has begun to spread so far south that Chengdu now has nine skating-rinks and local hockey leagues for both kids and adults. It clearly shows China’s     3     to take the opportunity of holding the Olympics to promote winter sports across the country.

The 2008 Beijing Olympic Games were praised as a success by almost every     4    : the wonderful opening ceremony, the tight security, the large crowds of     5     volunteers, and Team China’s place atop the gold-medal rankings. Each aspect of the event signaled the country’s arrival as a world power, capable of competing with the best and winning.

If 2008 was about China getting a seat at the table, the 2022 Winter Olympic Games     6     a different purpose. China's status as a global power is no longer in question. Beijing 2022 will not be just a two-week sporting event but the     7     of a multi-year campaign to promote winter sports. “ We no longer need to put on shows of ten thousand people performing Tai Chi,” said Zheng Kan. “ Now we just want to show that we are relatable.”

While the audience for winter sports may still be a small, relatively rich group, it is growing. To prove his commitments (承诺) to winter sports, President Xi Jinping     8     a “ three hundred-million-person winter-sports plan.” The plan is aimed at raising China’s participation rate in winter sports from less than two percent to twenty-two percent. Some schools in Beijing have already introduced courses     9     to winter sports. A high-speed rail line that was opened at the end of 2019 cuts travel time between Beijing and Zhangjiakou, where many of the events will be held in 2022, to under an hour.

With all these efforts, the 2022 Winter Olympic Games are     10     to be wonderful and unforgettable.

Sports Icons(偶像) Who Lead a Change

China’s sports industry has entered a new era when the superstars themselves become the absolute focus of public attention. Compared with the gold medals and    1    the Chinese team has received, sports stars play the role of    2    people and improving the status of their sports in China. The following is an overview of those stars who once were, currently are or in the future will become milestones to change China’s sports demographics(统计数据).

Yao Ming: China’s Ambassador(大使)

Standing at 2.29 meters, Yao Ming used basketball to become one of the mainstream    3    ambassadors in modern China. He first played for his hometown Shanghai Sharks team in the CBA where he became a CBA champion ad Finals MVP in 2002. Soon afterwards, Yao was chosen by the Houston Rockets as the top overall pick in 2002. Over an eight-year span with the Rockets, Yao became an eight-time NBA All-Star. Besides his    4    in the CBA and the NBA, Yao was also a big reason for China’s continued dominance in the Asia basketball scene and their constant presence at world-level competitions. To this day, Yao remains one of China’s most    5    sports and cultural icons.

Liu Xiang: A Great Breakthrough

China’s world champion hurdler, Liu Xiang    6    the nation’s long-sleeping interest in track and field events after he became the first man to ever win a men’s track and field event for China. Before Liu won a gold medal in the men’s 110m hurdle race at the Athens 2004 Olympic Games and set a world record two years later, Chinese people had never shown such a strong interest in track and field events. Liu has become a significant player in China’s track and field events and the craze that has followed him is    7    to Yao Ming’s influence on China’s basketball. Both athletes prove how powerful a super sports star can be on    8    the development of a sport in China.

Li Na: New Image of China’s Tennis

Being the first Asian to win the singles title of a Grand Slam tournament, Li Na opened the door to tennis in China and even Asia. Her victory at the French Open 2011 was like a fairy tale and she has since been    9    as a national sports hero equal to Yao Ming and Liu Xiang. A record-breaking 116 million viewers from China tuned in to watch Li become the French Open champion, marking the start of a women’s tennis boom in a country    10    left out of the tennis conversation.