Chapter 26: Reveal the True Color
Translator: Nyoi-Bo Studio Editor: Nyoi-Bo Studio
Youcai Wu stood beside the team, feeling as if he was the best out of all of them. The test prior to training had begun on the running track. Youcai Wu had put on an aura of disdain after he saw the grades the first team had gotten.
"The fastest was 12.55 seconds for this team, 0.5 seconds faster than me!"
"He must have been trained before."
"For sure. How could be so fast otherwise?"
"Who said you can't be fast if you haven't been trained before?" Youcai Wu said. Everyone looked at him. He looked very calm and continued, "I haven't been trained before either, but my best record was 12.11 seconds!"
"12.11 seconds! That's awesome!" The people around him were very surprised, and many of them looked at him with respect. For a bunch of high school students who only focused on studying, 12.11 seconds was a good enough record to make the others admire him.
A coach walked in with a list of names and said loudly, "Students who are called, go do some warm ups and get ready for the test. Yong Li, Wei Wang, Youcai Wu…"
Youcai Wu ran to the coach immediately when his name was called. He walked to the running track confidently. A coach on the stage that was not far away pointed at the running track and said, "Director Zhao, that's the same Youcai Wu who said his record was 12.11 seconds."
"Alright, let's see if he's worth our effort to work with him or not," Director Zhao ordered. All the coaches around were focused on the sports field.
Youcai Wu was still very confident that the others were not as fast as him. He got ready to run as the proctor gave the order.
Youcai Wu took off at the sound of the starting gun. However, he found that he was not the fastest one there in the very next second.
What the…? There is someone quicker than me, and not just one! OK, I see. It must be because I haven't sped up yet. I'll ditch them after I speed up! Youcai Wu clenched his teeth and used all his strength to speed up, but it didn't help at all. He was still behind others, and the gap between them was becoming bigger. Even the people who had been behind him were now right next to him.
Could it be that all the students on my team are of the highest level? How could I have such bad luck that I'm on the same team as them! A slight unwillingness crossed Youcai Wu's eyes. He didn't realize that his actual ability would be revealed without the help of Dai Li's explosive force halo.
12 seconds passed by in the blink of an eye. Youcai Wu ran past the finish line. He noticed that the other students were looking at him with a weird expression on their faces as he was about to chat with them.
Why are they looking me like that? Do I have something on my face? He felt very strange. The coach who was in charge of the finish line read their records out loud.
"Yong Li, 12.97 seconds."
"Wei Wang, 12.75 seconds."
"Youcai Wu…" The coach spoke in a drawn-out voice on purpose and looked at Yongcai Wu contemptuously. "12.83 seconds!" he shouted.
What? 12.83 seconds? How's that possible? How could I be so slow? I just ran 12.11 seconds last weekend! Youcai Wu was shocked. He didn't know what to do.
A creepy laughter spread all over. Everybody was laughing at him!
"He said 12.11 seconds? What a bad liar."
"Somebody's record was 12.55 seconds on the last team. Look at his bragging face. I thought he was a big deal. I didn't expect him to be a liar. Shame on him!"
Their discussion overwhelmed Youcai Wu and made his face look very pale. Shame, embarrassment…all these negative emotions overcame him in that moment.
12.11 seconds and 12.83 seconds. Even though the difference was only 0.72 seconds, it meant a big difference in the 100m sprint. If we took the ability of a 17-year-old high school student, for example, even if we couldn't say he was a sprinting prodigy whose record was 12.11 seconds without any formal training, he was still above average for sure. And there was a very big chance that he could become a professional athlete after being trained. However, 12.83 seconds could only prove that he was a young man in good physical condition. The possibility of him becoming an athlete was very small.
Shouren Zhao stood on the stage and smiled sneeringly. "I thought he had talent. Didn't expect him to be a liar. I shouldn't have been so happy before. These kinds of students have nothing but vanity. I doubt he would get trained with his ability. Let's not waste too much time on him and spend more effort on the other talented students." Shouren Zhao had decided Youcai Wu's fate in this 100m sprint training class.
Youcai Wu was not the only one who revealed his true ability. The other four students did, too. They had all been trained in Dai Li's class during the free trial period. With the help of the explosive force halo, they had all made a lot of progress in one day. However, Dai Li had removed them from his training list when they decided to choose the sports school, which meant that they couldn't benefit from the halo anymore. That was why everyone's speed times had gotten worse.
Dai Li didn't really care about the five students who had left. From his point of view, he had been kind enough to train them for free for one day. The progress had been so obvious that if the parents decided to leave anyway, it would only show that they didn't want to send their children here from the very beginning. There was no need for Dai Li to take responsibility for them anyway, since they were no longer his students.
He put all his effort into the eight students who had chosen to stay for a couple reasons. First of all, he had already received their training fee, which meant it was his responsibility to teach them. Second, he had promised that he would give the money back if they couldn't reach the standard. 15,000 yuan per person. He definitely didn't want to take the money he had already put in his pocket and give it back.
Sports training was a tedious thing to do. Training itself was about repetition after repetition. This process made athletes depressed and unwilling to be trained. To increase their motivation and emotions, professional experts created a "competition training method,""game training method," and so on. They had even put these methods in the textbooks. But sports training had nothing in common with playing house as children. The coach was not a kindergarten teacher. There was nothing they could do to rid themselves of the boredom. But Dai Li was already used to this kind of repetition. When he saw his students improve very fast, he felt it was worth it.
The training result of the sophomore coach was obviously better than that of the coaches from the sports school. Dai Li also gained a lot of empirical value during the process, until finally he got 1,000 points after one month. He upgraded again and went from the first level to the middle level as a sophomore coach.