Macao Wushu Team Resuming Training and Looking at Asian Youth Games
Wushu has long been winning medals for Macao, and the city's Wushu team trains as hard as usual even in the midst of the Covid-19 epidemic. Although this year has seen most overseas Wushu competitions either canceled or delayed, the Macao Wushu team has trained as hard and aimed as high as before, well aware that one perfect minute on stage requires ten years of practice behind the scenes. Iao Chon In, the team's chief coach, said“With or without competitions, we're clear that we should train everyday for better performance in future competitions.”
As the epidemic gets under control in Macao and the city's sport gradually gets back to its feet, the Wushu General Association of Macau finally held its first event in July. However, as constraints remain in place, the schedule for overseas competitions in the latter half of the year is still unclear. Iao said“Quite a few competitions were slated for the latter half of 2020, but now they are most likely to be postponed or canceled. There's no official notice on the cancellation of the November Indian Asian Wushu Championships just yet, but chances for it to go otherwise are slim. However, we'll keep training for the Championships as if it would come up as scheduled. We won't slacken even a bit even if there's no upcoming competition at all.”
The Wushu team stopped its training entirely from February when the epidemic first struck, but that, as Iao believed, left not that big an impact on the team's performance.“We put the training on hold for only somewhere around half a month. As approved by the Macao Sports Bureau, we are among the first sports teams to have got back to training in early March, and have trained six to ten sessions a week ever since. We're training for the Asian Wushu Championships and also for several large-scale comprehensive sports games put off until next year, especially the Asian Youth Games that we have never signed up for before. We hope to attend the Asian Youth Games and get good results there.”
If it weren't for Covid-19, we would have been attending competitions throughout the whole year as usual, and this year we slow down a bit. Iao said that as the team was not rushing from competition to competition, this window period allowed the members to ruminate on details of their moves and try more difficult moves.“We will be trying moves of higher difficulty and seeking to do Wushu moves in a better manner. Chances are we're not going out for competitions this year, so we're somewhat better hedged against the risk of injuries.”
