So Wa-wai
athlete from Hong Kong
So Wa-wai (Chinese: 蘇樺偉; Jyutping: sou1 waa4 wai5; born on 6th October 1981) is a retired athlete from Hong Kong who has competed in the Paralympic Games on five occasions, winning 12 medals. He has been referred to as the "Wonder Boy" (Chinese: 神奇小子; Jyutping: san4 kei4 siu2 zi2) by Hong Kong people.
Early life
So was born with jaundice which affected both his hearing and the balance of his limbs, and hence competes in the T36 classification for athletes with cerebral palsy. At the age of 10, his enthusiasm for running was noticed by athletics coach Poon Kin-lui, who then began to formally train So.
Paralympic career
His first Paralympic appearance came at the 1996 games in Atlanta, where he won a gold medal as part of the men's 4×100 m relay team in the T34–37 classification.
Over the course of the next two summer Paralympic Games, 2000 in Sydney and 2004 in Athens, So won four gold and two silver medals in a range of individual events, up to a distance of 400 m, as well as two bronze medals in relay events.
In 2008, So was chosen to be part of the torch relay as the Olympic flame passed through Hong Kong on its way to Beijing. However, his participation in the games themselves was put into doubt when an injury to his father rendered him unable to work. So was forced to give up his training and take up a full-time job to support his family. In response, Andy Lau, a Hong Kong entertainer and the singer of the Beijing Paralympic Games official theme song "Flying with the Dream", gave him a full-time job with the flexibility to allow him to train for the Games.
The public source identifies “So Wa-wai” as athlete from Hong Kong. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Wa-wai, athlete and Hong.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 27, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7549578. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1981, 1996, 2000 and 2004.
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This entry incorporates text from “So Wa-wai” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.