Knowing China Through Sports

David Ramírez Valdés is the star presenter and commentator on sports topics on the Chinese Global Television Network (CGTN), with multilingual service in Beijing. Since August 2010, this Cuban journalist has worked at CGTN, but his time in China goes back more than a decade. “I initially came to China to study Chinese at Beijing International Studies University in July 2007.”

His passion for swimming began at age five. His naive desire to learn to swim led him to become a full-time athlete. He was part of Cuba’s national swimming team in the mid-1990s and although a cervical injury abruptly ended his professional career, by then he knew that his “sentimental attachment to sport was not temporary.”

Ramírez with Cuban divers at the 2008 Beijing Olympics.

In 2005, he graduated with a degree in communications from the University of Havana, with the aspiration to alternate between advertising and sports journalism. After two years’ working at the Cuban Institute of Radio and Television (ICRT), an agreement between Cuba and China connected him definitively with the Asian dragon. “The idea was for professionals from Cuban ministries to come to China and after we improved our Chinese language proficiency, we would strengthen exchanges between institutions in both countries.”

An important event that was about to take place in China became his immediate professional goal. “It was 2007 and we thought that with a year of Chinese training I was going to be the translator for the Cuban ICRT delegation at the Beijing Summer Olympics, I’m the one,” he laughed. They were days of great emotions that Ramírez enjoyed intensely. “My whole life, I’d always dreamed of going to the Olympic Games and doing so was such a unique experience. A sports enthusiast like me dreams of seeing the finals of these four-year events, to see Michael Phelps winning eight gold medals and surpassing the feat of Mark Spitz of Munich ‘72, or Usain Bolt literally pulverizing the world records in the 100 and 200 meters, they are imperishable images forever in my personal archive.”