He Yiyi is a 24-year-old footballer who used to play for a professional youth team in China before losing one of his legs due to a rare form of cancer.
When he was 10, he was selected by Shenzhen Youth Football Club where he received professional and systematic football training. Two years later, he caught the eye of a French football scout and was invited for 10-years of football training in France.
At the age of 12, before he was set to embark on his journey, he was diagnosed with a rare form of bone cancer called osteosarcoma, which forced him to have his leg amputated.
However, he never gave up on the sport that he loves and spent four years developing his football skills with crutches.
His road to recovery included training through swimming and he participated in track-and-field. At the 9th National Paralympics in 2015, he won the gold medal in Men's Long Jump T42, the second place in Men's 100-metre T42 and the third place in Men's 200-metre T42.
In 2018, he was offered the chance to shoot a commercial video with his idol Cristiano Ronaldo. That earned him several nicknames such as Angel with Broken Wings, Single-Legged King of Football and Boy Wonder.
Now, he is a member of the Guangdong Disabled Persons' Federation and an amateur at the Shenzhen Football Club.
Yiyi started to record and share his stories on Kuaishou, China's top video-sharing platform, in May of this year and has gained nearly 50,00 followers ever since. He also garnered more than 5.9 million views with his post of him juggling a football and kicking it into a car boot.
*The story was sent by Kat Lin from PRNewswire.
