Ma Junren

Ma Junren (馬俊仁 October 28, 1944- ) is a famous Chinese track coach. He trained several world-class middle and long distance female runners including Wang Junxia and Qu Yunxia, who are the holders of several world records. He and his pupils are also called "Ma family army" (馬家軍) for their stunning performance in domestic and international events.

Starting as a track coach in a remote rural middle school, he adopts a systematic, scientific training strategy, which includes spiritual encouragement, nutritional tonic using Traditional Chinese medicine and balanced track training in both stamina and speed.

His training regimes are extremely rigorous, involving extremely high mileage (in excess of a marathon per day) run at high altitude.

There have been suggestions that he has employed performance enhancing drugs as part of his training regime. He has strongly denied this, although 6 of his athletes were among 27 competitors dropped from China's team for the Sydney Olympic games after failing blood tests. As a result he was dropped as a coach from the Chinese Olympic team. Following this episode, he and his entire team of athletes disappeared for several months, fueling further suspicion.

Ma is also controversial for his temper tantrums. He has admitted to physically beating his athletes on occasions. His original squad broke up with him for many reasons including late allocation of sports bonuses.

Ma retired as deputy director of the Liaoning Provincial Sports Bureau on December 1, 2004. He is recently interested in fostering world-class mastiffs.

External links

* [http://www.personalhealthfacts.com/cordyceps11.html A Giant Awakens]
* [http://sport.guardian.co.uk/athletics/story/0,10082,526431,00.html Ma's army on the march again ]
* [http://www.rediff.com/sports/2000/aug/28ma.htm Tough love and turtle soup is Ma's recipe]