I Called Her Number 2.

Her real name was Liu Qiuhong. She was our second-best short track speed skater — always right behind Wang Meng, stride for stride at 48 km/h, close enough to draft off her wake but never quite able to pass her. That’s how she got the nickname. Number 2.

She was a beautiful skater. The best way I can describe it: most of the other skaters were working. She was flying. Her movements were effortless — more like ballet than sport. She never seemed to struggle. And when a set was done, she’d break into this million-dollar smile that lit up the rink.

But while she was skating, she wore a mask. Completely expressionless. Devoid of emotion. The strangest juxtaposition I’d ever seen in one person — a girl who so clearly loved what she was doing, showing nothing on her face while she did it. Just efficiency. Concentration. Unshakable professionalism.

Everyone loved her. She couldn’t speak a word of English and my Mandarin was terrible — truly terrible — but she was so patient with me. In the early days I’m sure nobody could understand me, including her. She pretended she could. That was just the kind of person she was.

We were two weeks from flying to Vancouver for the 2010 Olympics. We had built something extraordinary in those four years — a juggernaut. We were beating the Americans, the Koreans, the overconfident Canadians. We owned them all. I genuinely believed we had done everything we needed to do to prepare our athletes for what was coming. I believed we were invincible.

It was a Tuesday morning practice. Routine warmup, routine drills. Everything normal. We were doing relay race prep — working out the last spots on the roster. A few athletes were still fighting for the fifth position, a backup role. The competition was real but the atmosphere was calm. Professional. Practiced.

I watched Number 2 come around the corner at 48 km/h and try to slow herself down.

I should have known. I should have seen it coming. But I was blind to it — completely blind. We had done agility work. We had done drills off the ice. I figured the skating itself would handle what we hadn’t covered. Li Yan had insisted on some of it and I had put it in. I thought we were prepared.

We were not prepared.

She slipped out. Took out the skater in front of her. They flew into the wall — and when the skate came around, it opened a six-inch wound in Liu Qiuhong’s thigh that took 200 stitches to close.

I had never seen an injury like that live. I had never watched someone that small lose that much blood. I had never stood on ice in that kind of silence.

Even with the best medical care in China, we couldn’t get her back in time. She didn’t go to Vancouver. The girl who had been stride for stride with Wang Meng for four years — who deserved a gold medal more than almost anyone I’ve ever coached — watched us board the bus to the Beijing airport from the sidewalk.

She was smiling. She waved. She was happy for us.

It’s the only time I cried in those four years. We all did.

Her injury was my fault. She trusted me. I should have been more knowledgeable. I should have been better. It will always be my fault. And I’ll never forget it.

I didn’t understand deceleration that Tuesday morning. I hadn’t thought seriously about it. I had never really been taught to think about it — and neither had almost anyone else in sport at that level. We trained acceleration. We trained speed. We trained power. Nobody talked about stopping.

Nobody talked about what happens when a body moving at 48 km/h needs to absorb its own momentum in a fraction of a second — on ice, under load, without preparation, without the specific training that would have given those muscles a chance to do their job.

I’ve spent every year since then making sure the athletes I work with are never in that position. Not because it’s good coaching strategy. Because of a girl I called Number 2, who stood on a sidewalk in Beijing and waved goodbye with a smile, when she should have been on that bus.

This is what we teach. And this is why.

Stopping Is a Skill. It Has to Be Taught.

Most people think of deceleration as the opposite of acceleration — you just slow down. But that’s not how the body works. Stopping is a completely separate skill. It uses different muscles, different mechanics, and creates forces the body has never encountered in the weight room. A cheetah’s ability to decelerate is roughly 60% greater than its ability to accelerate. The same gap exists in human athletes — and almost nobody is training it.

When an athlete decelerates at full speed, their body has to absorb close to six times its own weight in less than a quarter of a second. That force has to go somewhere — through the foot, the ankle, the knee, the hip. If those structures haven’t been prepared through specific, progressive training, the game will prepare them the hard way. Usually with a non-contact injury that nobody saw coming.

How We Develop the Ability to Stop

We build deceleration in three stages. The stages are sequential — you don’t skip to the end. An athlete who hasn’t built the foundation will hit a ceiling, or worse, get hurt doing the advanced work.

Number 2 — She Became the Teacher.

I’ve thought about her often over the years. I used to wonder if she ever made peace with what happened on that Tuesday morning. Whether the injury I should have prevented had quietly cost her more than just Vancouver.

She recovered. She returned to the ice and competed for several more years. And in 2014, I got a short email — careful English, chosen by someone who wanted to be sure she was understood. She told me she was becoming a coach. She was happy. She wanted to build on the things I’d taught her during my time in country. And then she wrote something I’ve never forgotten:

She said she wanted to encourage the youth to take up speed skating and learn its many charms — like giving one a healthy body and strengthen resistance to the cold.

I can still picture her smiling when she wrote that.

Liu Qiuhong — Number 2 — world championship medallist, coach, and the reason we teach deceleration.