HKU Bulletin October 2004 (Vol. 6 No. 1)

7 6 SPORTS RESEARCH Hard Slog for Windsurfing Medallist W indsurfer Vicky Chan Wai Kei, the first Hong Kong athlete to win a gold medal in a World University Games competition, leads an all-work, no-play lifestyle that leaves her friends wondering where is the fun. She agrees. Chan, who in the summer won gold in windsurfing at the World University Sailing Championship in Turkey, trains at least fours a day, six days a week, and is in the final year of studies for a Bachelor of Engineering. “I like competitions and I like the feel of being successful when I compete, but I don’t much like the training,” she confessed. “It’s very hard, but it’s the only way I can get to be good for windsurfing competitions. Every competition involves 10 or 12 races and lasts for one week, so good physical fitness is quite important.” Training involves two and a hal f hours most weekday mornings and afternoons in Sha Tin, doing everything from running and cycling to rowing and weight training to build up her all-round fitness. On the weekends she spends many hours windsurfing at Stanley – also her home – no matter what the wea T th h e e r. n there are classes to attend and assignments to complete. When does she find time to study? “I ’m st i l l free at night, so my l i fe is only studying and windsurfing,” she said. There is a boyfriend, too – but he is a windsurfer and they meet mainly during training. “It seems my life is quite boring compared to other students, but I love it. I love windsurfing,” she said. She started taking windsurfing lessons when she was 15, encouraged by her mother who windsurfs for pleasure. She was quickly spotted as a talent and promoted to the development squad, and within one year she was selected for the Hong Kong team. Her sister, three years younger, soon followed. Chan competed in Turkey with the support of the University and the Hong Kong Post-Secondary Col leges Athlet ic Association, and hopes to compete at the World University Games again next year, her final year. But her sights are fixed even further down the road. “After my studies I hope to do full-time training. My training schedule is now mainly for the 2006 Asian games, but of course I am looking at the 2008 Olympics,” she said. And will she be another Lee Lai Shan, who won gold in the Atlanta Olympic Games in 1996 and placed in the top five in Athe “ n W s? e are different. I hope I can be the next champion. I may not be like San San, but maybe I can be even better,” she said. T he actors Tom Cruise and Whoopi Goldberg may be two of the world’s most famous dyslexics but the widely-held theory that the reading dysfunction has a single cause has been scuppered by researchers in the Department of Linguistics. In a breakthrough that may have major impl ications for teaching, learning and neural surgery, researchers have found that Chinese children who suffer reading difficulties use different parts of their brain to Westerners. The pioneering research, the results of which were published in the prestigious journal Nature , was led Dr Tan Li-Hai. He found that dyslexia varies according to culture and not only on individual cognitive differences as previously thought. This is the f i rst study to be conducted on Chinese dyslexics, looking speci f ical ly at how their brain functions when reading. As a relatively common reading and language disorder, dyslexia af fects f i ve to ten per cent of alphabetic language speakers. But it is also a common disorder in Chinese communi t ies where i t affects around two to seven per cent of children. Working in collaboration with colleagues from the University of Pi t tsburgh and Bei j ing 306 Hospi tal , Tan used funct ional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to scan Chinese dyslexic children’s brain activity while they were reading. Their study suggests that for these children, the problem lies in the left middle frontal gyrus part of the brain. Because the relation between visual form and pronunciation is arbitrary in Chinese, in learning to read, children learn the characters’ visual form, phonological information and meaning by rote. Unlike alphabetical languages, there are no rules to follow in Chinese, so co-ordination and integration of these three kinds of information is crucial to successful reading ability. The left middle Pinpointing Dyslexia in the Brain frontal cortex serves this function. Reading difficulty in Chinese develops not only from a failure to grasp the connection between a character’s visual shape and its pronunciation but also from a poor understanding of the link between visual shape and meaning. The research, supported by a Hong Kong Government Central Al location grant disbursed by the Research Grants Counci l and the National Institute of Mental Health, greatly advances our understanding of the nature of dyslexia, said Tan. “It also verifies our previous findings that the left middle frontal cortex is the centre of Chinese reading. I think this will have important implications for neuro-surgery and for all doctors who perform brain surgery. “We now know that we must protect the motor and language areas of the brain if we are to avoid post-surgical loss of language ability,” he said. An ongoing research project includes a large-scale neural imaging study of 400 children in Beijing. This, hopes Tan, will help develop remedies to train Chinese dyslexics.