Zou Chunlan showed photos of her weightlifting career.

Zou Chunlan is former weightlifting champion from northeast China's Jilin Province. First joining the Jilin provincial sports team in 1987, she won three successive national weightlifting championships and nine gold medals from 1987 to 1993, the year she retired. She also broke national and world records. However, the years following Zou's retirement have been anything but celebratory.

Zou suffered greatly from the effects of daily usage of the male hormone androgen during her career as a weightlifter. Zou said her coaches gave androgen pills to her and her teammates every day, telling them that they were nutritional medicine and good for health. After Zou's voice started to become coarse and the other players started to grow facial hair, the coaches revealed the pills were androgen, but said that taking the drug would have no harmful effects to the lifters' bodies. This would again prove to be false.

Eight years after her retirement, Zou found that she could not easily reverse the effects of long-term androgen use. A medical check in 2001 showed that her male hormone levels surpassed most men. In 2002, she got married but could not understand why she could not become pregnant, despite a normal sex life. At first, she doubted that the hormone use had caused her infertility, until doctors told her otherwise. The pills had destroyed Zou's dreams of becoming a mother.

"I doubted that pills I took when I was an athlete were the real cause," Zou said. She had since indicated that she and her husband would be open to adopting a child.

In 2007, Zou had plastic surgery at hospital in Changchun, which included eyebrow beautification and hair removal from her legs and face, so that she could once again look more feminine. Reportedly, the costs of the surgery were extremely high, possibly 100,000 yuan (US$13,690). However, the hospital kindly exempted her from any fees.

After retirement, a long hard road for former champion

Despite her great success as an athlete, Zou fell into financial difficulty after her retirement. After a few years doing menial jobs in the women's weightlifting team kitchen, she was asked to leave. With the education equivalent of a third-grade student, Zou had no choice but to find manual labor jobs such as carrying sacks at a construction site and selling lamb kebabs on the street. Finally, she got a job working as a masseuse at a bathhouse, where she barely made ends meet earning 500 yuan (US$77) a month.

Years later, in 2006, reports of Zou's hardship began surfacing in the media, drawing criticism of China's treatment of former athletes. The "Zou Chunlan phenomenon" has since become a catch-phrase for athletes who aren't guaranteed a pension after their retirement.

In response to the media pressure, in April 2006 the Jilin Sports Bureau and the All-China Women's Federation donated 200,000 yuan in equipment to help Zou start a laundry business to earn a living.

Originally, the business gained steam as people flocked to catch a glimpse of the former world champion. However, the novelty soon wore off. Zou said that the high costs of operating the laundry only allow her to earn 2000 to 3000 yuan per month in profits.

"Nobody cares whether or not you are a renowned person. People are still not willing to work for a lower wage," she said.

In order to help other retired women athletes start their own businesses, Zou has given lectures throughout China.

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