ASU Olympians
Dissecting their psyche
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A Passion Suppressed with a
Chance to Move on
Photos provided by Gao Ao
Grandeur. Pride. Unity. The biggest stage in the world. The Olympics.
It’s the ultimate test for professional athletes aspiring to take their talents to the highest level. A place where elite competitors experience the pinnacle of their careers, bodies screaming from extreme highs and collapsing from crushing defeats.
But, to Gao Ao, ASU water polo defender and two-time Olympic athlete, the feat lies not in the Olympics itself, but in reaching the Games with a passion, cultivated in childhood, still intact.
For Ao, this feat was a reality.
“I felt a lot of pressure and after a while, when you live in that life for so long, you’re kind of like a robot,” Ao said. “You feel almost like an outsider. There’s just no more passion anymore.”
The 25-year-old Beijing native was just 13 when she joined China’s National Team, one created out of China’s developing team when the country’s massive capital was named the host city for the then-upcoming 2008 Olympics. Ao said the hardest part was being a fetus of a program when the European and U.S teams had had national and club teams 30 years prior to the creation of the Chinese National team.
“It was super hard for us to just start everything from scratch because we just came out of nowhere.” Ao said.
In the beginning, Ao reveled in the opportunity to even be a thought for the upcoming Olympics. Uninterested in water polo at first and playing only for her school in China, Ao’s initial dream was to attend a better academic school.
She joined the national team and two years before the Olympics at 16, realized she had a legitimate chance at the sport she gave so much of herself to, and her focus changed.
“It became legit because I was like ‘Oh wow, I might make this team,’” she said.
And make the team she did. In 2008, Ao competed in her first Olympic Games in her home city of Beijing, a moment she described as the best in her career, and one that still gives her goose bumps.
“It was just unreal,” Gao said. “I had trained and prepared for years for that and being in that moment it was just so emotional and you think, did that really happen?”
But the training started to really take its toll on the young athlete shortly after her first stint at the Olympics. Finishing fifth after a loss to Australia by one goal, she was unsatisfied with the outcome and vowed to continue her training for the 2012 London Olympics.
"You must try and train extremely hard to compete in the Olympics as athletes," Yun Ren, Ao's mother said. "I also told her to just consider the training as a positive thing."
But, it was different the second time around for Ao. The National Team training became something that would cause more pain than happiness in the then-18-year-old’s life. One, she said, she often questioned she even had.
“During the second Olympic cycle, I wouldn’t have another life except for training,” Ao said.
The national team had a strict schedule each of its members had to adhere to. For Ao that meant a 5:30 a.m. wakeup call, practice in the pool from 8 a.m.-11:40 a.m., followed by a short break for lunch before a three-hour afternoon session. Once the athletes refueled at dinner, they came back for team meetings and video sessions followed by treatment at 8:30 p.m., for players that were tired or injured. At 10, the team went to bed and woke up seven and a half hours later to do it all again.
This schedule was six days a week for eight years of Ao’s life. Soon, the monotony crept in.
But, determined in spirit, Ao gave everything she had to give those four years. What crushed her mentally was the exhaustion that consumed her.
“We would cry all the time,” Ao said. “But you wouldn’t cry out loud. You would cry in the water when no one would see you during swimming and conditioning, It was just such intense training every single day. It was just so tough.”
During this bout of training, Ao and her teammates lived at the training camp away from their families. Many days, they dreamt of going home, but by the time the athletes had a few hours to themselves, there were too fatigued to travel home for only half a day before they would have to return.
On top of the six-day training schedule, the national team put its athletes bodies to their utmost physical tests. The team traveled to areas of higher altitude to train and condition so their bodies were used to the highest level of strain during competition. If someone didn’t give 100 percent effort in the skills portion in the pool, they had to come back in the afternoon and make the entire session up.
The ultimate goal for athletes is going to Olympics and winning, but you will face many difficulties before you get there," Ao's National Team Coach Sheng Hua Pan said. "A good thing about those difficulties is that you can always find a way to solve them. As a coach, I have to encourage and praise these athletes when they are improving and getting better. I also need to help them as much as I could to face any obstacles, so they can achieve their goals."
Then, at the end of each day, each player had to write down everything they felt did not meet the standard that day.
“It was just so exhausting because the standard was just so high that sometimes I thought I would never finish,” Ao said. “The good part of it was with the bar set so high you were just automatically better because your teammates would push you to be faster which is a good atmosphere in general, but sometimes it was just too much.”
As the Olympics crept closer, Gao realized the reality of her situation. The last seven years of her life had been spent in a pool. Or, hundreds of pools, in fact. She had been to nearly every continent for countless tournaments. She went to Europe, Australia, New Zealand, Asia and Canada. But there, all she saw were the pools, the hotels and the airports. At night, she had nightmares about doing poorly and not placing. When her teammates went out, there was utter silence, each athlete so hyper-focused, they ignored everything else around them. She lived her life in a shallow tunnel, water closing in on every side.
Until she decided to make a change.
In 2011, she took a year and a half hiatus to come to the U.S. where she planned to pursue an education at Arizona State University. But, unable to just throw away all of the hard work and anguish she endured during her National Team training, she vowed to push her start date until after the 2012 Olympics, traveling back to China to train three months before London.
This time, however, the shiny newness of the event had worn off, and Ao was ready to move on with her life.
“The second Olympics I would say was just sad,” Ao said. “We knew the majority of the players were going to quit after the whole thing and then it was just like history repeated itself exactly the same way as the first Olympics. We came fifth again, ironically against Australia and losing by one goal.”
Despite a hard-fought effort, Ao was ready to shift her sights to a new, developing passion. The initial move to the U.S. was hard for Ao. She was completely by herself and struggled to fit in with the ASU water polo team at first, due to the language barrier.
Nevertheless, she was excited to pursue water polo as a pastime, in a much less stressful environment, finding journalism to be her next path.
“When I decided to come here for school I kind of just wanted to play as a side-thing, but no longer as a professional athlete. My passion isn't really in polo anymore, but actually in journalism, telling stories visually through video and documentary.”
This year, Ao will be traveling back to the Olympics. This time however, she won’t be going as an athlete. Instead, she will be outside of the pool, taking pictures and recording video as a reporter, covering the Rio Olympics. No longer stuck in the tunnel, but on the outside, experiencing it.
“It’s bittersweet,” Ao said. “It's a love and hate relationship because I've done it for so long. It brought me so much honor and so many memories but now, it’s just time to move on.”