Girl swims with hands and feet bound

Now this one’s a strange story …

Little 10 year old Huang Li was watched by her father as she saw in the chilly southern China river, Xiang River, for three hours on October 2nd with her hands and feet bound! Her father believes the task will help his daughter achieve her dream of swimming across the English channel.

Huang Li managed to swim more than a mile in the river in early October. She traveled with the current as she swam moving like a dolphin through the water.

“Her swimming skills are perfect and she insisted on doing this,” Huang Daosheng said in a telephone interview. The girl, who lives in the city of Zhangjiajie in Hunan province, got the idea after seeing something similar on a local television program, he said.

With the Beijing Olympics less than a year away, sports is grabbing greater attention in an already sports-crazed country. Huang Li’s swim is at least the second time in recent months that a child athlete has drawn media attention.

Huang swam in a skirted swimsuit with her hands tied with string and her feet bound with a strip of cloth. Her face had a blue tinge due to the cold.

“It’s not dangerous because, first, her swimming skills are really good and second, I was swimming with her, staying close to her,” the father said. “I had her when I was 35, so she is my heart. I would never play around with her life.”

The father, a teacher who enjoys swimming, coaches his daughter and said the family does not have enough money for her to have a better coach. The girl started the sport when she was six and her father said her goal is to one day swim across the English Channel.

“She asks me every day, ‘Can I achieve this? Is the English Channel wide? Are the waves really big?'” Huang Daosheng said.