45-year-old former Chinese volleyball Olympic champion Zhao Ruirui remains unmarried. She retired at 28 due to injuries, then successfully crossed into writing, living a free, self-determined life.
At the age of
18, Zhao Ruirui became a key player on the Chinese women’s volleyball team; at 22, she won the World Cup championship and was named the tournament’s Best Spiker.At the 2004 Athens Olympics, she took the court with her arm wrapped in three layers of bandages and after receiving a pain-blocking injection; when she spiked the final match point, no one knew she had been awake all night due to excruciating pain from her injury.At the 2008 Beijing Olympics, the Chinese women’s volleyball team won the bronze medal. As soon as she stepped off the podium, she already had a doctor’s diagnosis in her pocket—an old injury resulting from years of high-intensity training meant she could no longer continue competing.At 28—the prime of an athlete’s career—she hung up her jersey and officially retired.
The public had originally assumed that, as an Olympic champion in women’s volleyball, she would choose a stable and smooth path in life, but to everyone’s surprise, she instead plunged headfirst into the completely unfamiliar field of writing.With no prior writing experience, she started from scratch, learning about narrative structure and character development. She spent three months poring over relevant books in the library, meticulously refining her work word by word and sentence by sentence. In 2011, her first original full-length novel was officially published, making her the first active or retired athlete in China to publish a full-length novel.She subsequently released several works and won numerous literary awards; this cross-industry transition has indeed yielded remarkable results.
In her early
years, she was rumored to be romantically involved with Yao Ming. As soon as speculation began to circulate, she immediately issued a statement to set the record straight—her actions were decisive and straightforward, without any hesitation. When asked by others about her criteria for a partner, she simply replied that she would never settle when it came to marriage and romance.Public pressure to get married has followed her for more than a decade, yet she has never let these voices sway her. Over the years, she has neither sought attention nor stirred up controversy; her daily life consists of either sitting at her desk writing or packing a backpack to travel the world.
Life doesn’t come with a predetermined script. The setback of being forced to retire at age 28 due to an injury didn’t knock her down; baseless rumors and gossip didn’t hold her back; and she never accepted the societal expectation that women should get married once they reach a certain age.Today, she leads a fulfilling and carefree life, releasing new works one after another and doing as she pleases whether she’s out and about or at home—embodying the image of a clear-headed, self-assured individual that many admire.
