2 . Milo of Croton was a legendary Olympic wrestler in ancient Greece. Milo won many Olympic gold medals. He won for the first time when he was a boy of 12. After that he didn't compete again for eight years. When he once again wrestled at the Olympics, he won a gold medal every year for five years. Milo was more than 40 years old when he lost a match for the first time. He lost because his enemy made him tired, not because he was less strong than his enemy.

Mito was proud and boastful. He liked showing off his amazing strength. He would stand on a slippery iron disc and tell people to push him off. Of course they never could. Not even iron bars could keep him in a room if he didn't want to be there. He would just bend them open and escape.

Milo was so strong that he once saved many of his friends from certain death. It happened that the roof of the building where they were holding a meeting began to collapse. Milo stood and held the roof up until all his friends had left the building. Then he ran out before the roof collapsed on him.

But there came a time when Milo's strength could not save him. Milo was walking through the forest when he found a trunk partially split. He thought that it would be fun to test his strength. He wanted to see if he could split the trunk right in half. He put his hands into the place where the trunk split. He pushed with all his strength to split apart the trunk. The trunk moved slightly and then closed on his hands. He tried to pull them out, but without success. He was trapped. According to the legend, he was eaten alive by wild beasts. Not a very nice ending for a famous wrestler. But, perhaps, he should have realized that he could not stay so strong forever.

5 . Born in California and representing the United States before switching to China, teenager Gu Ailing will be most likely to be one of the faces of the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics.

The 17-year-old is a freeskier(自由式滑雪运动员) and grade-A student with an American father and Chinese mother. She grew up and still lives in the United States, but in June 2019 she made the “quite difficult” decision to compete for China. She wrote on Instagram that she was “proud of my heritage and equally proud of my American upbringings (培养)”.

As for the decision to compete on behalf of China, she said it is “valuable opportunity to help inspire millions of young people in China where my mom was born.”

Gu graduated from a San Francisco high school last year and is focusing on her Beijing 2022 training. It is reported that She scored 1,580 points out of a maximum 1,600 in the SAT (美国大学入学考试), and has been offered a place at Stanford.

Gu started on the snow at the age of 3, was competing in national competitions at 9 and won her first World Cup event at 15. She won two gold medals and a silver for China at the 2020 Youth Olympic Games in Lausanne, Switzerland. On Jan. 30th, 2021, Gu made her debut(首次亮 相) at the X Games in Aspen, Colorado and won two golds and a bronze.

“My goal is to win Olympic gold,” she told the official Olympic website. “It’s the top achievement. And that would be rewarding for all the work that I’ve done to achieve greatness in the sport.”

6 . Kobe Bryant (1978-2020), in full Kobe Bean Bryant, was an American professional basketball player, who helped lead the Los Angeles Lakers of the National Basketball Association (NBA) to five championships (2000-02 and 2009-10).

Bryant's father, Joe ("Jelly Bean") Bryant, was a professional basketball player who spent eight seasons in the NBA and eight more playing in Italy, where Bryant went to school. When his family returned to the United States, Bryant played basketball at Lower Merion High School in Ardmore, Pennsylvania. He gave up going to college and declared himself qualified for the NBA draft when he graduated from high school. The Charlotte Hornets chose him with the 13th pick of the 1996 draft. He was traded to the Lakers shortly after and became the second youngest NBA player in history when the 1996-97 season opened. He quickly proved himself with the Lakers and was selected for the NBA All-Star Game in just his second season, becoming the youngest All-Star.

Bryant was forced to share the role of the Lakers' star player with his popular and talented teammate Shaquille O'Neal. The two had an uneasy relationship, but they found success under the leadership of Phil Jackson, who became coach of the Lakers in 1999. Bryant, a shooting guard, and O'Neal, a center, meshed into a remarkably effective combination, and by the time Bryant was 23, the Lakers had won three consecutive NBA championship.

Bryant was also a member of the gold medal-winning U.S. men's basketball teams at the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games and the 2012 London Olympic Games, In 2015 Bryant wrote the poem Dear Basketball , and two years later it served as the basis for a short film of the same name, which he also narrated. The work won an Academy Award for Best Animated(动画的)Short Film; In 2018 Bryant published the book The Mamba Mentality : How I Play , in which he described his approach to basketball. The title reflected a nickname he gave himself during his playing days, “The Black Mamba”. On January 26,2020, Bryant and his 13-year-old daughter were among a group traveling to a girls' basketball game in a helicopter when it crashed, killing all nine people aboard.

8 . Most people would tremble at the idea of getting caught up in a 73.5-foot wave. But for Brazilian pro-surfer Maya, it presented the perfect opportunity to break her 2018 world record for the largest wave surfed by a female. The athlete skillfully maneuvered (操控) the massive wave at the World Surf League (WSL) Nazare Tow Surfing Challenge in Praia do Norte, Portugal, where she established her first world record by riding a 68-foot wave.

“When I let go of the rope, I had a feeling it could be the one but wasn’t sure. The speed was very high, but the noise that the wave made when it broke made me realize that this was probably the biggest wave I’d ever ridden.

Her record, earning her WSL’s 2020 women’s Biggest Wave Award, was two feet higher than Dupont’s wave, who had ridden the largest wave. It was also 3.5 feet higher than the 70-foot wave ridden by the 2020 men’s Biggest Wave Award winner Kai Lenny!

“Our sport is very male-dominated, with the performances on the male side being often much stronger than ours as females,” she said. “This year, a woman did surf the biggest, tallest wave of the year. It opens the idea that in other categories and other areas of surfing, this could be accomplished, too.”

Though Maya, who has been surfing competitively since she was 15, seemed to effortlessly move over the monster surf, it has not all been smooth sailing. Her first attempt at pursuing the world’s biggest wave in Nazare, Portugal, in 2013 could have ended her career. The surfer suffered a disastrous wipeout that broke her ankle and almost caused her to drown. However, it did not reduce her determination to create her record as one of the world’s greatest surfers!