Specialist coaches and hours of practice a day: the making of China’s six-year-old Rubik’s Cube prodigy

The mother of the six-year-old girl who broke the women’s world record for solving a Rubik’s Cube in an average time of just over four seconds said the accolade was a “dream come true” for her daughter, who trains for up to three hours a day for competitions.

“She was overjoyed and felt that all her hard work had paid off,” Lin Yangxi told the Guardian of her daughter’s feat.

Lian Yunzhi, known as Zhizhi, broke the women’s 3x3 average world record at a “speedcubing” event in Guangzhou hosted by the World Cube Association on 16 September. The girl, who is from Chengdu, solved the puzzle in an average time of 4.27 seconds, breaking the record of 4.52 seconds she had set earlier in the month. In some single attempts, she has solved the puzzle in under four seconds.

“The whole school knows her now,” Lin said. “The teacher told me that older students came to her classroom with slips of paper asking for her autograph, crowding the room.

“She has gained a lot of love and attention through cubing.”

Zhizhi’s journey from amateur Rubik’s Cube hobbyist to world record-holder started at four years old, when her mother took her to speedcubing classes as one of her “seven or eight” extracurricular activities, which include dancing, painting and gymnastics.

Although Zhihi was well-behaved in all her classes, Lin and her husband decided that the speedcubing route “had great potential for her future development, so we proactively chose to invest more time in it.”

Lin said that solving the puzzle helped “improve concentration, memory, logical thinking and spatial awareness”.

“We felt it was really good for her.”

However, Zhizhi’s world-beating success didn’t feel inevitable. After several months of training, she brought her average time down to eight seconds, but then hit a bottleneck.

“For about three or four months, no matter how she practised, her times didn’t improve at all,” Lin said. “To be honest, both as parents and the child, we felt like giving up at that point.”

But after finding a specialist teacher in Shanghai and learning more than 1,300 Rubik’s cube formulas, her speeds improved “very quickly”.

Zhizhi now balances training for speedcubing events alongside her kindergarten studies, spending two to three hours on weekdays and up to six hours at the weekend on the puzzle.

Lin said most weekends were spent at speedcubing competitions, which were a chance for Zhizhi to unwind from regular practice and see friends.

Zhizhi used to envy children who had more playtime, her mother said, “but she later told me she no longer envied them, because pursuing her own goals made her truly happy too”.

While physical injuries are rare in speedcubing, Lin monitors Zhihi’s eyesight for signs of myopia, a shortsightedness condition that is especially prevalent in China.

Lin said she and her husband felt “extremely nervous” at this month’s speedcubing championship, but admired how their daughter “handled the pressure at that crucial moment”.

Zhizhi’s mother doesn’t see a speedcubing career for her daughter, but said the sport instilled good habits.

“We just wanted to accompany her as far as she could go. It can forge some grit and perseverance in her, which will serve her well in whatever she chooses to pursue in the future.”