These heroes win the gold for courage
Who can forget 17-year-old Kerri Strug at the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta? Heading into their final event, the vault, the gymnastics team looked poised to secure the United States’ first-ever team gold in the women’s competition. But then, teammate Dominique Moceanu fell on both her vaults.
It was up to Strug to secure the win, but she, too, fell on her first vault, suffering torn ligaments and a third-degree sprain in her left ankle. We now know that the Americans had secured the gold medal by then, because the Russians had done a poor job on the beams.
Strug, her coach and 32,000 spectators at the event, did not know this, however. And when her coach told her that she had to perform her vault and perform it well for the team to win gold, this young woman turned off the pain and executed a flawless second vault, sticking the landing on one foot.
Hers was a lesson in individual courage, sacrifice and perseverance.
The history of the Olympics is sprinkled with such inspirational stories, and maybe one, two, or more of these stories will be written in these Olympics, which begin today in China.
But while we celebrate the Olympic athletes, we should know that some of the most inspirational stories of the Beijing Olympics have already been written, according to U.S. Rep. James P. McGovern.
These stories, he said, have been written by the courage, sacrifices and perseverance of those individuals who stood up for their rights in a country whose soul is scarred by its human rights abuse record.
Mr. McGovern gives us the following human rights gold medal winners:
•Harry Wu, a 2002 Nobel Peace Prize nominee who was beaten, tortured and starved while spending 19 years in 12 different Chinese labor camps, but who through his advocacy at the Laogai Research Foundation, exposed the brutality of China’s forced labor camps.
•Bob Fu, the leader of the student democracy movement that culminated in the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. In May 1996, after secret police discovered a Bible school he had started, both he and his wife were imprisoned.
Upon their release, he found his way to America, where he founded the China Aid Association, which draws attention to the ongoing persecution of House-Church Christians.
•Wei Jingsheng, also known as the “Father of Chinese Democracy,” was arrested in 1979 and sentenced to 15 years of prison, mostly in solitary confinement. Upon his release in 1993, he worked to revive the democracy movement in China.
He was rearrested and, after a show trial, was sentenced to 14 years in prison. With the help of international pressure, he was released and exiled in 1997. He is the recipient of the Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought, named after the famed Soviet dissident Andrei Sakharov.
•Rebiya Kadeer, a Nobel Prize nominee, is a champion of the rights of the Uyghur Muslim ethnic group in northwest China. She was detained in August 1999 on her way to meet a visiting congressional delegation and convicted of endangering state security, even though the local newspapers she was carrying at the time of her arrest were all publicly available. She was tried in secret and sentenced to eight years in prison.
Following intense international pressure, her sentence was reduced by one year. While her advocacy has continued here in the states, several of her 11 children still in China have faced ongoing harassment, detentions and even imprisonment.
•Sasha Gong, author of “Born American,” formed an underground dissident group in China as a young woman, which produced writings urging people to consider democracy and rule of law. She was jailed for nearly a year and subjected to intense interrogation.
Hers is a remarkable story of achievement in the face of oppression. Shortly after being freed from prison, she sat for the national university entrance exam and despite never having completed elementary school achieved the highest score among 200,000 students.
She eventually earned a fellowship to Harvard and is now an acclaimed scholar and activist in the United States.