Even China’s most decorated Paralympians have faced discrimination.
Blind at birth, Ping Yali was working at a rubber factory in Beijing in the early 1980s when local sports officials approached her about training in the government-run sports system. She agreed, and went on to represent China in long jump at the 1984 Paralympic Games in Los Angeles. There, she became the first Paralympic athlete to win a gold medal for China.
Back in China, Ping was hailed as a national hero and her gold medal was placed in the Beijing Olympic Museum. After her victory, she hoped to ride the wave of success, as Olympians had in retirement, by becoming an administrator at a provincial sports bureau or a coach on a local sports team.
But the Chinese government, which spends far less on training athletes for the Paralympics than it does for those in the Olympics, offered scant support, and no such opportunities came up. Ping went back to working in factories, but was later laid off. Eventually, she took a job as a masseuse in a massage parlor, a low-paid line of work that is a common occupation for the blind and visually impaired in China.