Chinese domination leads to talent exodus
SEOUL: South Korea’s top female table tennis player, China-born Jeon Ji-Hee, has an easy explanation for why she had to leave her homeland to compete in the game she loves.
“There are way too many good players in China,” Jeon said after a pre-Olympics practice session. “It’s extremely hard to make it to the national team.”
This simple recognition has led to an exodus of Chinese talent — and to worries that it will take more than the wanderings of China’s second-tier athletes to save a sport so thoroughly dominated by one nation.
At the Rio Olympics, China will not only have the world’s best table tennis players, but also will have produced the best players on the rosters of many other national squads.
Unrelenting dominance by one country of a sport isn’t unusual, of course, but China’s table tennis supremacy is on a different level. Some believe that for the sport to thrive other nations must have some hope of winning on an international stage every now and then — and not just with outside Chinese talent.
Table tennis in China, despite what some see as a dip in its popularity, remains a source of national pride. A highly developed infrastructure scouts talented young athletes, often in kindergarten, and then grooms them into world beaters.
The success of this system is reflected in Olympic gold: China has won all but four gold medals since table tennis became an Olympic sport in 1988.
Before the 2012 Olympics in London, a rule change allowed each country to only put forward two players for singles. China rolled on regardless, winning all the golds and silvers for singles, and leaving bronze for the rest of the world.
The exodus of Chinese players is partly explained by the intense competition to make the national team. Current world No.1 Liu Shiwen, for instance, didn’t get one of China’s two spots for singles.
With so much talent, many Chinese players must contemplate a move abroad for a shot at the Olympics.
The United States has two players who started their careers in China, including Yue “Jennifer” Wu. Three of the players on Australia’s six-person team were born in China and a fourth was born in Melbourne to Chinese parents.
Only three nations in the women’s competition in 2012 were without a China-born player, or a player with Chinese roots — Egypt, North Korea and Japan.
China seems to recognise a need to help the rest of the world catch up.
Officials have made efforts to try to nurture talent in other countries, allowing foreign players to attend table tennis schools in Chinese provinces, for example, and sending Chinese coaches abroad, Zhao Xia, a Chinese Table Tennis Association official said.
Far from resenting the exodus of talented players, China encourages and supports them, said a national table tennis association official who would only give his surname, Wang, because he wasn’t authorised to speak to the media.
“It’s possible that those players might beat Chinese national team players, but still, it is in China that they acquired their skills and tactics,” Wang said.