The first time that Peng Junyue and Huang Yebo met, seven years ago, it seemed as if there was no hope for the Chinese duo. But even as they finished last in the luge men's doubles at the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics on Wednesday, there is still plenty of cause for optimism.

Had Peng not stayed to practice luge at a training camp with the Chinese national team, it could easily have been a different story. Yet having become the first Chinese athlete to compete at the Olympic luge doubles event, Peng and his partner have more than a glimmer of achieving what appeared to be the impossible in the coming years.

"In 2015, a coach called me to go to a training camp where China would hold a selection test for the national luge team. But I misheard on the phone and thought it was a basketball team tryout at first," said Peng, who played basketball in his early life. "It was only when I actually got there that I realized what was going on. But when I started training, I found luge quite interesting, so I stayed on."

Huang, once a professional sprinter, nodded in agreement, revealing that his entry into the luge team was also purely coincidental. "The luge team was the first to start the selection process," he said. "If it had started later, I would have been on the bobsleigh or skeleton team, I wasn't even sure of the difference between the three disciplines."

"When we first started training, the sled would flip over every time we slid, sometimes two or three times in one go. Every time we fell, we got up and kept practicing, that's how we started," he added.

Peng also pointed out that the partners in the luge doubles event cannot be changed often and that the two "must form a strong bond and train relentlessly for a long time" before they could possibly get good results.

"When we race down the course at over 130 km/h, there is practically no way to communicate through words," Peng observed. "We can only use subtle body languages and our experience to tell each other what adjustments need to be made."

Peng and Huang's years of hard work finally paid off at their first Olympics. With International Olympic Committee (IOC) President Thomas Bach among those looking on, the duo set a new personal best at the National Sliding Center, finishing two runs in two minutes and 1.572 seconds.

The German pair of Tobias Wendl and Tobias Arlt sped to their third successive doubles gold in one minute and 56.653 seconds, making it three luge golds out of three for their country at Beijing 2022. While China is still lagging far behind Germany in luge, there's no denying that reasonable progress has been achieved over the past few years.

The host nation's drastic improvement in luge wasn't lost on Bach. Huang revealed that the former Olympic fencer made a beeline for them after the race and offered some words of encouragement.

"He (Bach) hopes both of us can continue our current momentum, and then we will meet again at the next Winter Olympics," Huang beamed. "Peng and I plan to participate in many, many Winter Games together and our ambition is to stand atop the podium in Olympics one day."

(Reporting from the Yanqing competition zone)