Benjamin Alexander is Jamaica’s first Olympic alpine skier (高山滑雪运动员), but he was a late 【小题1】 (develop). The 38-year-old only discovered his love 【小题2】 the sport at 32. “I never skied before at that time,” Alexander said. “They 【小题3】 (fly) us up in the helicopters at the top of the mountain to meet the skiers...”

For more than two years, Benjamin Alexander pursued a dream of becoming the first person 【小题4】 (present) Jamaica at the Winter Olympics. For him, competing in the Olympics is something he never thought about as a kid. He grew up in England and began working as a DJ as 【小题5】 17-year-old teenager, but he stopped doing so as he grew tired of the violent scenes at local nightclubs. After 【小题6】 (study) engineering at University College London, he moved to Hong Kong. Then Alexander booked a month-long trip to ski, 【小题7】 he met former Europa Cup lever ski racer, Gordon Gray, who criticized Alexander’s technique but said that he was 【小题8】 (absolute) fearless.

Gray added: “If you’re afraid you’re never going to get any work 【小题9】 (do), even with all the technique in the world. 【小题10】 if you’re fearless, then we can teach you technique and I think there’s a chance.”

Chinese teenager Quan Hongchan won the gold medal for the women’s 10-meter platform diving at the Tokyo Olympic Games on Thursday.

Not only is Quan the youngest 【小题1】 (compete) in the women’s diving field, but also she’s the youngest of 431 athletes 【小题2】 China sent to Tokyo for the Olympics. If the Games had gone on as 【小题3】 (schedule) last summer, she would have been too young to meet the minimum age (14) 【小题4】 (take) part in the diving competition. Now, she’s made Olympic history.

Each of Quan’s dives was the highest of the five rounds of competition at the 10-meter platform. Two scored perfect 10s from all seven 【小题5】 (judge). Only one judge found a flaw (瑕疵) with her final dive, 【小题6】 (give) her a 9.5 next to six 10s. But it didn’t count, thanks to diving’s scoring system. The two highest and two 【小题7】 (low) scores are thrown out and multiplied (乘) by the dive’s degree of difficulty. That means only the three middle 10s counted 【小题8】 her final dive and added up 96 when multiplied by the 3.2 degree of difficulty.

At such 【小题9】 young age, Quan was a totally unknown until winning the 2020 Chinese national Championship at 13 years old. She 【小题10】 (be) a 17-year-old veteran (老手) when the Paris Olympics start in 2024.

How deep can a person dive underwater without any 【小题1】 (breathe) equipment? As one of the world’s top female freedivers, China’s Xu Tongtong’s answer is beyond the limit.

Freediving is gaining 【小题2】(popular) across the world. Divers rely only on their lung capacity to plunge as far as they can-either in open water in so-called “depth” events or in the swimming pool, 【小题3】 (simple) called “pool” events.

This year, the 35-year-old Xu 【小题4】 (dive) 100 meters underwater successfully in both constant weight (CWT) and constant weight bifin (CWTB) contests, becoming only the third female freediver on the planet 【小题5】(reach) this depth. “When I dived 100 meters and grabbed the depth tag, I knew I had done it and 【小题6】(swim) back to the surface with a smile,” Xu joyfully recalled of her 【小题7】 (history) feat (壮举).

Hailing from East China’s Anhui province, Xu changed from swimming to freediving in 2014. “I was able to enter the three-dimensional world from a two-dimensional space. That is 【小题8】 I fell in love with freediving,” she told Xinhua in a recent exclusive interview. The biggest attraction of freediving lies 【小题9】 facing up to and overcoming our fears. The training is a process of constantly knowing oneself, said Xu. After three months of training and competing this year in Panglao, Xu decided to stay on the island to continue her training and coaching, 【小题10】 major source of income for this world-class freediver.