PUBLISHED ONAugust 08, 2024 4:54 AMByLim KeweiAs a two-time Olympic champion and a father to two young daughters, Danish shuttler Viktor Axelsen has a lot on his plate.
And in times of immense stress, the current world No. 2 badminton player has taken to practising his Chinese writing skills, which he says helps bring inner peace.
Following his victory over Thailand's Kunlavut Vitidsarn at the Paris 2024 Olympics men's singles finals on Monday (Aug 5), Axelsen answered questions posed by reporters from Hong Kong TVB in Chinese.
Netizens were impressed by his fluency, with a clip of the interview uploaded to Facebook garnering over four million views at the time of writing.
"That was surprising," commented one user.
"He speaks better Mandarin than most of us. So fluent and confident," said another.
As it turns out, Axelson started learning the language from a personal tutor in 2014 and would go for lessons after his badminton sessions, he told China's state-run media CCTV in a video uploaded to his Weibo page in May.
He had also previously said that learning Chinese started as a joke, that being fluent with it would help him become a better badminton player, according to Olympics.com.
Axelsen frequently adds Chinese captions to his social media posts and is also active on various Chinese social media platforms such as Douyin,
He gave himself the Chinese name 'An Sai Long' with 'Long' meaning dragon in Chinese. His daughters Vega and Aya have Chinese names too.
In a Xiaohongshu post on June 6, the shuttler had showed off his Chinese writing workbook with the first page filled in.
"Calming down and relieving stress by practising writing," he captioned.
Elaborating on his new goal in another post on Aug 6, Axelsen said that while his Chinese speaking skills is "so-so" and he can type using hanyu pinyin, he does not know how to write the characters.
"I found this book at the airport... which allows me to learn and practise writing. So, I told myself that maybe I will start learning how to write, and it can also be a good way for me to unwind when resting," he said.
"It will definitely be hard, and my progress will definitely be very slow as I don't have much [free] time, but wish me good luck!"
The newer post has since received 22,000 likes from netizens, who cheered him on in the comment section.
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lim.kewei@asiaone.com
