Olympic Day in SU: Library Celebrates School’s 121st Anniversary with Fun Races

SU library and Office of Physical Education added touches of sports fun to this year’s school anniversary with the event “Olympic Day in Soochow” at the library in Waishuangsi campus on March 13^th, 2021. Setting out from the idea of supporting Tokyo Olympic Games, the activity featured a series of creative races and games where distinguished guests including former Olympic athletes gave their shots and competed with SU President Wei-Ta Pan.

Also attending the event were President of Chinese Taipei Olympic Committee Hong-Dow Lin, the advisor Lih-Chyun Sun, the 2004 Olympic gold medalist Mu-Yen Chu, the gold medalist of the 2018 FISU World Shooting Sport Championship Ai-Wen Yu, and some others.

President Pan noted that SU attaches great importance to sports development, which is evidenced by two decades of hosting the world-renowned Soochow University International Ultra-marathon.

There were five game areas in the hall inside the library: basketball, table tennis, football, baseball, and badminton. Each area had different levels of trials, including ball playing skills, book collection games and knowledge challenges. Led by President Pan, many teachers and students competed against the former Olympic athletes. Participants could win medals whenever they completed all the levels.

Pan also introduced to the distinguished guests the comic reading area of the school library, which preserves many precious and out-of-print comics and has a collection of more than 30,000 volumes, the most among all the libraries of colleges and universities in Taiwan. Pan hoped that SU students could learn sportsmanship and the attitude of not being afraid of failures from the comics.

Mu-Yen Chu, who served as the publicity ambassador for this event, recalled his own childhood. His family ran a bookstore when he was a child, which gave him the opportunity to read comics and then enjoy them. He added that champ comics gave him a great deal of inspiration to move forward and keep fighting, and he always encourages himself to be like the characters in the comics who works hard and never gives up when suffering setbacks.

President Hong-Dow Lin praised Soochow University for taking the lead in supporting the Olympics with actions. He also called on everyone to continue to watch the showings of the athletes who have prepared themselves for years to compete in the Tokyo Olympics, because the support of the fellow countrymen is also key to better performance of the athletes.