The Letter Her Coach Never Gave Her

In July 2021, ten days before the Tokyo Olympics opened, Zhang Jiaqi was at a training base in Beijing. She had just finished an afternoon of dry-land training. Her hair was still wet. Coach Ren Shaofen walked over with an envelope, glanced at it, and placed it in her drawer. The envelope had Zhang Jiaqi’s name on it. The sender was her mother. Until the Olympics ended, that envelope was never opened.

No one would have known.

Three years later, Zhang Jiaqi sat on a couch on a variety show, holding three sheets of paper. The letter had been written by her mother. It was the same letter. Ren Shaofen had not passed it on, but Xiao Yingjie had kept a draft. The show arranged for the mother to read it aloud. When she reached the line “Although you didn’t perform well, Mom still chooses to trust you and forgive you,” the camera cut to Zhang Jiaqi’s face. It showed no expression.

“It’s all nonsense to me,” she said. “Same as always.”

Those words carried more weight than anything in the letter.

The letter

It was handwritten, three pages, neat strokes. The opening was mild enough: “Since you chose diving as a career, stick with it, work hard, win more gold medals.” The second paragraph turned. “What did you take our trust for? Can’t you be less of a worry in daily life?”

Then came requirements measured down to grams. Absolutely no more snacks. No asking others for snacks. A person must have dignity. Then the line that would be screenshotted again and again: “Treat Mom like a child you have to manage. Stay with me. Don’t leave me for a single minute.”

At the end, a list of names: Guo Jingjing, Chen Ruolin, Shi Tingmao, Sun Yang. A seventeen-year-old girl who had just lost the individual event was told to measure herself against these names.

The letter was written after Zhang Jiaqi lost the individual ten-meter platform event. She was preparing for the synchronized event. Her body was in the middle of puberty. Every dive required her to find her center of gravity again. After training she went back to her room and fell asleep the moment she lay down. If the letter had reached her, she would have read it. She would have taken every word in. Then she would have climbed the ten-meter platform carrying the weight of those three pages.

Ren Shaofen read the letter. She had coached Chen Ruolin, who at the 2008 Beijing Olympics overtook the Canadian diver on her final dive and reclaimed the women’s platform gold that China had lost for twelve years. She had coached Liu Huixia, the 2016 Rio Olympic champion. She had coached Chen Lin, China’s first women’s world champion in diving. She had seen too many children crushed before competition by all kinds of things. She read the letter, said nothing, and put the envelope away.

Who raised this child

Zhang Jiaqi later said one sentence: “I wasn’t raised by you. I was raised by the team.”

Anger was not the point. She entered the Beijing diving team at seven. For more than ten years after that, her daily life was managed by the team. What she ate and how much was calculated by sports science staff. When she woke, trained, and slept was decided by coaches. If she gained a hundred grams, the next day’s training plan changed. Her period, injuries, and shifts in form were better known to the doctors and coaches than to her.

Ren Shaofen remembered Zhang Jiaqi’s birthday. In 2018, when Zhang Jiaqi turned fourteen, Ren Shaofen ended training early and bought a cake. The girl was overjoyed. She held the cake up and took a photo. Then she posted it. Then the cake was taken away. Not one bite. Weight control. The photo remains. The cake was untouched.

Xiao Yingjie said in an interview that she had “missed” her daughter’s growing up. But “missed” is not the right word. She did not miss it. She chose a position: standing at a distance, responsible for making demands and checking results. When Zhang Jiaqi was little, her mother never gave birthday gifts. Gifts came only after competitions. When she came home from the team, her grandmother would bring out good food. Her mother would only say, “Eat less. Control your weight.” At the moments of greatest pressure, what Zhang Jiaqi got from her mother was not comfort. It was “You didn’t perform well.”

From the age of ten, Zhang Jiaqi began earning prize money. At thirteen, she won two gold medals at the National Games. The prize money was 810,000 yuan. All of it went to her mother. Her mother had a 13.1-gram gold necklace made as a gift for the championship, but kept it herself, saying she was “afraid she’d lose it.” By the time Zhang Jiaqi was twenty-two, she had never seen the necklace. After retirement, she wanted to take back part of her savings to learn about managing money. Her mother’s answer was: “You don’t understand this.”

The moment the letter was held back

Competitive sports has a cruel common sense: pre-competition mental state is fragile. An athlete trains for more than ten years. Technique is carved into muscle. But mental defense can be pierced by a single sentence in a few days. So the national team strictly controls pre-competition information. Family letters go through the coach first. Anything inappropriate is held until after the competition.

The team was protecting athletes. That mattered most for a seventeen-year-old. Especially a child going through developmental changes, who had just lost the individual event.

That letter contained judgment. Control. A condescending “forgive you.” An obsession with snacks. A string of names she could not reach. Missing were the words “Mom knows you’re tired,” and “No matter how you place, just come home.”

Ren Shaofen had coached for more than forty years, from 1986 until her retirement. She had seen several generations of parents. She knew what kind of letter could steady an athlete and what kind could push one over the edge. The moment she put the letter in her drawer, she made a judgment: if this letter reached Zhang Jiaqi, no one could save her state.

In the Olympic synchronized ten-meter platform final, Zhang Jiaqi and Chen Yuxi won by 52 points over the second-place pair. Five dives. Three perfect scores. The girl with the calm face on the platform entered the water with barely a splash. No one knew what she carried inside. At least the three pages were not in her bag.

Too late

When the show aired, Zhang Jiaqi had already retired. She was twenty-two. She announced it after the Paris Olympics. She cited her body, developmental changes, and being “born at the wrong time.” Quan Hongchan and Chen Yuxi had arrived and taken the top spots. She had missed the best window.

On the show, her mother read the letter. Halfway through, she began to choke up. Zhang Jiaqi sat opposite her, hands on her knees, leaning back slightly. She did not interrupt. She did not go over. Her mother finished. She cried. She apologized. Zhang Jiaqi said, “It’s too late. I don’t need it now.”

That line was cut into the trailer and trended. Some called her cold-blooded. Some called her unfilial. But if the timeline is stretched out, the logic is clear. She had needed something when the pressure was greatest, and did not get it. She had needed something when she was most lost, and got a letter of reprimand. After winning Olympic gold, she got a photo of a gold necklace her mother had kept. Needs have windows. Once the window closes, opening it again does not give you the same thing.

She later explained in an interview: “When I was little, I gave her chances to be close. But when I needed her most, she didn’t comfort me. So I don’t depend on you. I have no needs from you. Why should I be close to you?”

Revenge was not the point. She was making a calm assessment of a relationship. She chooses to support her mother, but keeps distance. She will not block her mother on WeChat, but she will not send her heart either. She said she would “leave her something to hold onto.” That something was for her mother, not for herself.

Below the platform

On the eighth day after retirement, Zhang Jiaqi walked into a livestream and started selling products. The comments called her “forgetting her roots,” “cheap,” and asked how an Olympic champion could do this. She responded directly: “I accept everyone’s criticism, but I also need to live.”

She won the national championship at twelve. At fourteen, she won two golds at the National Games. At seventeen, she won Olympic gold. Over her whole career: one Olympic gold, three World Championship golds, two World Cup titles. She missed Rio by one year of age. She lost the individual event for Tokyo. Before Paris, she was pushed out of the list by younger talents. She owed diving nothing. She just did not want to owe herself anymore.

Ren Shaofen later retired. When the last world champion she coached left the platform, she stood by the pool and high-fived every team member. A video of her resurfaced online, captioned “the coach is more like a mother than the mother.” Zhang Jiaqi liked it.

No one knows where the held-back letter went. It is still in a drawer of Ren Shaofen’s, or it was thrown away. But its fate was set that summer: it never reached Zhang Jiaqi’s hands. A coach who had produced several Olympic champions used forty years of experience to make a judgment and hold back a letter. That judgment protected a seventeen-year-old girl’s last focus on the Olympic stage.

As for the letter itself, Zhang Jiaqi had heard every sentence before, in one form or another. Whether it arrived or not made little difference. The difference was that, that summer, someone chose to block these things for her. That person was not her mother.