Windsurfing crosses the Iron Curtain and reaches China

In Eastern Europe Western equipment was hard to get and expensive, so pioneers built their own boards from photographs. Youth science magazines published building plans, in Hungary in 1975 and in the Soviet Union in 1977, where one such magazine had a circulation of 1.7 million. By 1975 the USSR had competitions on home-made boards with city teams from Riga, Tallinn, Leningrad (St Petersburg), Moscow, Minsk and Tbilisi. In East Germany the authorities distrusted the sport’s aura of American freedom and restricted it.

China followed in 1979. After a French windsurfing film was shown on state television in January, four sailing coaches built a board from small photographs and tried it on the water on 6 June. Their leader, the coach Wang Li, organised a hundred boards for the country’s watersports centres, and national championships began in 1981.

Olympic status turned windsurfing into a priority for Chinese sport. In 1984 Zhang Xiaodong won the women’s course racing at the Windsurfer World Championship in Perth, and in 1992 she took the silver medal at the first Olympic women’s event.