11-year-old table tennis whizzkid aiming for glory
Table tennis prodigy Anna Hursey on being the youngest ever Welsh sporting international
THE ordinary side of an extraordinary prodigy is most easily glimpsed on her bedroom wall and in her DVD player. That’s where you find Anna Hursey’s posters of Ariana Grande and her Pretty Little Liars discs.
‘There are seven seasons and I’ve just finished it really quickly,’ she says. ‘I was watching it all the time, on sleepovers with my friends or in airports and stuff.’
There are a lot of airports in Hursey’s life. And that’s related to why this 11-year-old is a little less ordinary.
On a basic level, she is a 5ft 3in table tennis phenomenon who will represent Wales at the Commonwealth Games in Australia this month. The numbers behind her selection are truly staggering — European No 1 for her age, world No 18 for Under 15s, best in Britain at Under 18s and Wales’s youngest ever senior international in any sport.
‘Sometimes the older girls get really annoyed when they lose to me and they kick the barriers and stuff,’ she says with a little giggle.
But there’s also a deeper level to her story, with Hursey and her parents serving as an intriguing study into what makes a sporting marvel. Depending on your point of view, the sacrifices and measures have been extremely impressive or utterly bewildering.
EITHEr way, it is a fascinating tale that starts in China. It’s where Hursey’s mother, Phoebe, is from, and it is where she took her daughter on holiday aged five. Hursey had picked up a bat for the first time a few months earlier and while in Harbin, Heilongjiang province, her mother brought her to a local coach for a session.
‘ It wasn’t anything we had planned on that occasion,’ says her father, Lawrence, an Englishman who works in the criminal justice system in Cardiff and had dabbled in table tennis as a club player.
‘What became apparent was that she had some technique. When she came back she went to her local club and one of the national coaches spotted her and asked if she could join the Welsh set-up. That was at five. From there it really snowballed very fast.’ Within a year, Hursey was Welsh Under 11s champion and her family relocated their home from Swansea to Cardiff to be nearer to a table tennis club that allowed her to train more often. Hursey was only six when her parents made the call to back her talent with a move. ‘Some people disagree completely with anything like that,’ Lawrence says. ‘We know that but we took a decision and followed it.’ If that was unconventional, perhaps even more so was the path the family chose to go down over the next five years, starting with the decision for Hursey to return to China for the summer at the age of eight. That time it was for the purpose of training in a nation which has won 28 of the 32 gold medals available since table tennis became an Olympic sport in 1988.
Hursey went back to Harbin again in February 2016 for a fivemonth training trip at the age of nine and then returned to China for a further five months of intensive sessions after spending just seven weeks at home. Those latter two stints saw her training 30 hours per week alongside her schooling, with Phoebe travelling with her daughter while Lawrence stayed back at home in Wales. ‘They are fanatical there,’ Lawrence says. ‘It is a place where you are training against excellent players. It was obviously a big step for Anna.’
Quite aside from the level of opposition, the nature of the environment is illustrated by the troubling stories Lawrence Hursey has heard of abuse against young Chinese athletes, though not his daughter.
‘Anna has seen it,’ he says. ‘It wouldn’t happen to the Europeans. But they (the coaches) have hit them (Chinese athletes) with bats and that is not OK.
‘Not everyone is like that — in China you have a lot of people who obviously wouldn’t do anything like that. But because of the culture, and everything people do to succeed in any way there, there is a serious hard-nosed nature.’
The progress made in that furnace is indisputable, with Hursey representing the Wales senior side at just 10. But the wisdom of a child committing so heavily to a sport at such an age is something that is open to reasonable debate.
FOr her part, Hursey describes her experiences in China as: ‘really good training but hard — they have three sessions a day, with morning training, rest, evening, rest, night time. It is a lot. I trained like seven hours a day over there.’
It is necessary to add that the family of four — Hursey has an older brother — seemed happy on
Sportsmail’s visit. But Lawrence is aware of how it might look on the outside.
‘I like to think we have co-operated with what Anna has wanted to do,’ he says. ‘I think “pushy parent” is a stereotype way of considering things. She has had to want to do it, she has had to want to be in that place. We are talking a lot of training.
‘But on the other side of it Anna, as well as her sport, has had excellent cultural and educational experiences. She has been all over the world, she speaks Mandarin.
‘But we know we have made mistakes. Maybe at times we pushed a bit much or didn’t push enough. I think that last trip to China, that was a one-off. That won’t happen again. It was a strain, the family being split up.
‘And I am actually trying to build in more rest time and other things, other interests, but this is what she wants to do.’
So far it has carried Hursey to ‘Italy, Spain, China, Fiji, Germany and loads and loads of other places’, she says, and a massive training room is currently being built in her garden in Cardiff to help with the next step.
If all goes to plan, that will mean hitting her rather ambitious aim of finishing on the podium in Australia. ‘I don’t want to go and just be there,’ she says. ‘I don’t want to make up the numbers.’
Nothing about her past suggests otherwise.