The story of an old Chinese gym and its even older patrons
Live MintEach afternoon without fail, a handful of men mostly in their 60s gather at an old bicycle shed in southwest Beijing, clad in sweatshirts and track pants and ready to pump iron. Up to eight men could be doing bench presses, dumbbell curls or wide-grip pulldowns in the windowless shed, their rust-stained equipment built decades ago with scrap metal from a nearby railway wagon factory where they used to work - a far cry from modern gyms elsewhere in the Chinese capital. Many club members were young men in their 20s and 30s when it was founded in 1984 by Zhang Wei, winner of Beijing's first long-distance race in 1956 and a fellow worker at the state-owned Erqi factory, said current gym manager Xu Wei, 63. Xu moved the gym to the 130-square-metre shed - about the size of a four-bedroom apartment - in 2018 with the help of his former colleagues after Zhang died four years earlier. Xu has posted on the walls of the gym numerous photos he's cut from a local magazine of bodybuilding greats from the 1980s and 1990s, including Lee Labrada and Kevin Levrone.
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China Daily
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