World's No.1 female tennis player Simona Halep received an honorary doctorate from West University in Romania's Timisoara last week. Having secured 18 WTA titles as well as the 2018 French Open championship, Halep saw her image further improved. She's not alone as the following sports champions in China are also highly educated.

Three-time Olympic gold medalist and multiple-world-champion, Chinese star swimmer Sun Yang in September became a PhD candidate at the Shanghai University of Sport majoring in kinesiology. Sun has kept a daily training of swimming over 15,000 meters, which contributes to both his physical building for competition in the pool and knowledge in the mechanism of swimming. He has spent years transforming from sprint swimming to distance swimming while persisting in getting academic degrees. So far, Sun has been doing well in both sectors.

Hui Ruoqi, 27, is a former outside hitter of the Chinese women's national volleyball team and bagged gold at the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro with her teammates. Before retiring in February, Hui received her master's degree from Nanjing Normal University with her thesis analyzing the development of Chinese women's volleyball league in late 2017. She then decided to continue her research career by going for a doctorate degree in human sociology of sports at the same university.

As the only Chinese female basketball player who has received the WCBA (Women's Chinese Basketball Association) championship (twice), the CUBA (Chinese University Basketball Association) championship (five times) and the CUBS (Chinese University Basketball Super-league) championship (three times), Shao Ting was actually a student before becoming a basketball player, having entered the Beijing Normal University following gaokao, China's national college entrance exam. Playing basketball and studying have been basically of equal importance for her which explains why Shao was often found working on papers at World Championship events or taking classes right after training sessions.

With 18 world titles under her belt, Chinese table tennis legend Deng Yaping said goodbye to her 14-year-long athlete career in 1998 and got her bachelor's degree in English from Tsinghua University in 2001. She then went abroad for a master's degree in contemporary Chinese studies at the University of Nottingham and received it in 2002. She did not stop there either but went to University of Cambridge for a doctorate in economics which took her five years to get, becoming the first world-class heavyweight sports athlete to have received such a degree in Cambridge's history.