Sun Jinfang, former Chinese women's volleyball captain who led the team to China's first global title in three major ball games, has fought leukemia for 14 years.
70-year-old Sun Jinfang holds a tournament briefing handed to her by a former teammate from the women’s volleyball team
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No one would have imagined that this former national team captain—who, back in the day, precisely controlled the power of her passes on the World Cup court, helped the Chinese women’s volleyball team win China’s first-ever world championship in the “three major ball sports,” and swept four individual awards in a single tournament—has been battling blood cancer for 14 years.
During her playing career, Sun Jinfang rose from a key player on the Jiangsu team to captain of the Chinese Women’s National Volleyball Team. As a core member of the team’s run to five consecutive world titles, she would often stay in the training hall until late at night, repeatedly refining the placement and power of her sets—a process that honed her ability to deliver sets with pinpoint accuracy on the court.After retiring, she transitioned into sports management, overseeing various responsibilities including sports lottery operations and tennis promotion. The prolonged, high-intensity, round-the-clock workload gradually took its toll on her health; shortly after the start of 2001, abnormalities in her hematopoietic function began to emerge.At the height of her
illness, she completely lost her sense of taste, and even eating and drinking caused intense stinging pain. Yet when her former teammates came to visit, she smiled and reassured them, saying this was simply an additional test in life. It wasn’t until 2014, when news of her illness was made public, that the outside world learned she had quietly endured a decade of suffering.In 2020, her condition suddenly worsened. Accompanied by her family, she traveled to the United States to undergo two high-risk total blood exchange procedures. Even as she was about to enter the operating room, she was still sending messages to her subordinates in charge of the tennis program, instructing them on the preparations for various junior tennis tournaments.
By 2025, she had stopped appearing in public, but those who knew her well were aware that she continued to follow every women’s volleyball match and every related development in the sports world.
People often only realize the importance of health when they’ve neglected it; those who have spent years working tirelessly for their careers have, for the most part, temporarily set aside the warning signs their bodies have been sending them.Throughout her life, Sun Jinfang relied on her tenacity to weather one trial after another of illness, while so many others around her—who were just as constantly on the go—still neglected their own health in the midst of their busy lives.I often reflect on how, among all the people I’ve met who give their all, very few have consistently managed to keep their health firmly in hand.
