At the World Championships final, my rifle broke because of a fifty-cent screw.
My name is Zhou Yufei, a gifted young shooting athlete from Xia Country. That silver medal burned my neck like a brand. No one believed it was equipment failure, until Head Coach Lin Yue took me into the training center's warehouse. Sixty-three percent of the air cylinders were past their service dates, and seventy-five percent of the barrels were unusable. The next life-or-death match was just forty-seven days away.
Official procurement would take eighteen months, but an athlete's golden years couldn't wait.
So my coach walked a tightrope. He contacted Zhao Hai, a businessman who operated in the shadows, and used "special channels" to get the parts we desperately needed. I knew he was taking a risk, but when I gripped the rifle assembled from "smuggled parts" and took aim at the bullseye again, I knew only one thing: I had to win.
Then customs inspection lights illuminated the entire shipment, and Chen Zheng, the meticulous deputy director of the Public Security Bureau, raised a pair of cold handcuffs before my coach.
They said he had committed the crime of weapons smuggling.
But they hadn't seen the two hundred children behind the warehouse, all of them waiting for the sound of gunfire, just like me.
Was this a "crime" committed for the sake of victory, or a desperate, tragic act of self-rescue forced by the system?
When national honor collides head-on with the law, who should be held responsible for that broken screw?
