Victor Wembanyama Says Shaolin Temple Training Was the Hardest He Has Done
The San Antonio Spurs' French superstar told the American audience of '60 Minutes' that his 2025 training summer at China's Shaolin Temple was brutally hard — and that he earned a Shaolin rank. Chinese social media, which followed the pilgrimage all summer, welcomed the sequel.
Appearing on the American program "60 Minutes" on November 2, Victor Wembanyama let a Chinese monastery back into the news. Asked about the summer of 2025, the San Antonio Spurs' 2.24-meter French star said his special training stint at the Shaolin Temple in Henan province was brutally hard — a regimen of daily high-intensity training on which he also earned a "Shaolin first-duan" rank, the temple's own grading of martial accomplishment. Chinese outlets picked the clip up within hours, and "Wembanyama: Shaolin training is too hard" was on Baidu's trending board by evening.
Chinese readers already knew the outline. In May, ESPN's Ramona Shelburne published a long account of the trip, and the details circulated widely on Weibo: the monk who trained him, Master Yan'an, has practiced at Shaolin since he was six and has climbed the stone stairway to the Damo Cave — some 1,500 steps of uneven width and steepness up Mount Wuru — thousands of times. Tourists need an hour or two for that climb in daylight. Wembanyama, on the sixth night of his retreat, did it in the dark.
The climb, as the ESPN report was retold on Weibo, has no lighting, and a misplaced step can send a climber down the steep stones. Trainees walk it at night with the monks, feeling the path with their feet. Master Yan'an's framing of the exercise is the sort of line that made the story travel: "I told him: you compete on the basketball court, I cultivate the martial arts. To reach the top level, you must do what ordinary people cannot." Climbing, in his telling, has two layers — the day trains the body, the night trains the mind. On the basketball side, Wembanyama's camp paired the monastery work with ordinary prep, and the ESPN piece credits the summer with fueling his subsequent run.
For an international reader, the curious part is not that an NBA MVP candidate wanted an unusual training summer — athletes always do — but where he went to find it. The Shaolin Temple has spent four decades branding itself as the world capital of mind-body discipline, running kung-fu academies that have trained generations of foreign students, and the temple's capacity to absorb a 21st-century superstar into a 1,500-year-old routine is exactly the soft power Beijing likes to point at. State media's culture desk, noting the "60 Minutes" moment, has already framed it that way.
Wembanyama told the program he left with a first-duan certificate. Whether he returns to Henan for the second is unrecorded; the uneven steps, in any case, are still there.