Enjoying the process of a fight
Under Liu’s tutelage Huang, who once considered winning or losing the most important thing, has learned to enjoy the fun of boxing.
Once in an international competition Huang was up against an Olympic silver medalist. The night before the bout, Liu sent her a text message: “You have to be a steady fighter, and you must trust yourself and be positive about yourself.” Although Huang lost, “I really enjoyed the process of that fight. I brought all my skills into play, and in the third round I even got scores of ten from two judges, which showed the judges’ affirmation of my abilities.”
In the critical semifinal match in Tokyo, Huang was up against the Turkish boxer Buse Naz Cakiroglu, who was the top seed in these games and the European champion. “I had seen her performance in the past, and I really wanted to have the chance to fight her, as I felt I should do all right.” Huang kept this remark of her coach in mind: “The process is more important than the result.” “Losing means that in some way I wasn’t good enough, so the only thing to do is improve those aspects and make myself better.”
A second father
A few days after Huang won her Olympic bronze medal, it was Father’s Day in Taiwan. On her Facebook page she expressed her gratitude to her “second father,” coach Liu Tsung-tai. “Without him, I think I would have wanted to give up on boxing,” says Huang.
The year Huang began senior high school, she lost a bout by a single point, which affected her greatly. For nearly a year, she avoided the gym and avoided the ring. It was Liu who brought the runaway Huang back to the sport. He asked her to come back to the gym and enter the qualifying competition for selection of national team members, and in 2013 she comfortably became a national team competitor, putting her life on a new track.
Liu is the person who cares most about Huang. In 2018, while competing in the Asian Games in Jakarta, she fractured a bone in the sole of her right foot. She hung in there and finished the fight, qualifying to go through to the gold medal match. But in view of her condition Liu decided to withdraw her from the rest of the competition, so that she came away with only a bronze medal. “He really took into account my future career as a boxer. If he had not made that decision on the day, would I have been able to fight my way into this Olympics?” wonders Huang. She rested for six months after her injury, and Liu was with her every step of the way through her rehabilitation. In 2019, having returned to competition, Huang won a gold medal at the Women’s World Boxing Championships in Ulan-Ude, Russia.
When she is in the ring with an opponent, Huang can hear her coach’s instructions through the noise of the crowd and react at once with a counterpunch. This is the kind of chemistry that exists between this coach and this athlete, showing that every fight is fought by both of them together.
Prepping for 2024
In preparing for the Tokyo Olympics, both Huang and Liu say that the Tokyo 2020 Gold Plan of the Ministry of Education’s Sports Administration was enormously helpful. First, there are dedicated athletic trainers to provide immediate help in the event of injury, and second there was help in finding training partners. It was not easy to find a sparring partner for someone of Huang’s height and strength, and Liu had to invite male boxers from Taiwan to train with her. Also, they knew that the majority of the boxers in Huang’s 51-kg weight class in Tokyo would be left-handed. The Gold Plan provided support for overseas training, enabling her to spar with different opponents and gain experience.
Liu explains that traditional training is by no means unimportant, but if you want to win a medal in international boxing today it can only make up 30% of total training, while the other 70% must be done using modern techniques. For the Tokyo Games, specialized data from the NSTC Sports Science and Research Department team meant that competing for a medal at the Olympics was no longer simply a matter of grind and hard work, but was also founded in data analysis. For example, it was possible to analyze how many times per round a given opponent attacked the midriff or initiated an attack, including analysis of the directions of the opponent’s punches and their habits. The data provided by the NSTC team enabled coaches to make better use of training and strategy sessions.
After returning from Tokyo and taking a short break, Huang went right back into training to prepare for the 2022 Asian Games. At the same time, her longer-term goal is to compete at the 2024 Paris Olympics.
“You did it, you are doing fine.” This is something that Liu Tsung-tai said to Huang Hsiao-wen, and it is the feeling we all have in supporting her.