Ma Junren

Who is Ma Junren?

Ma Junren is a famous Chinese track coach. He trained several world-class middle and long distance female runners including Wang Junxia and Qu Yunxia, who hold several world records. He and his pupils are also called the Ma family army for their stunning performance in domestic and international events.

Starting as a track coach in a remote rural middle school, he adopted a systematic, scientific training strategy, which includes encouragement, nutritional tonics using Traditional Chinese medicine and track training balancing stamina and speed.

His training regimes are extremely rigorous, involving extremely high mileage run at high altitude.

There have been suggestions that he has employed performance enhancing drugs as part of his training regime. He has strongly denied this, although 6 of his athletes were among 27 competitors dropped from China's team for the Sydney Olympic games after failing blood tests. As a result he was dropped as a coach from the Chinese Olympic team. Following this episode, he and his entire team of athletes disappeared for several months, fueling further suspicion.