Marvelous Ma marches to glory
Rio championship completes rare global grand slam
The world champion beat the defending champion to win Olympic table tennis gold on Thursday.
Not surprisingly, both were from China.
China’s top seed Ma Long made up for being excluded from the singles in 2012 by sweeping aside “his brother”, defending champion Zhang Jike to capture gold.
The lopsided 14-12, 11-5, 11-4, 11-4 triumph gave Ma the grand slam of Olympic, World Cup, World Tour and world championship titles.
And it left China’s table tennis team on course for a third consecutive clean sweep of gold medals at the Olympics after scooping up every title at Beijing 2008 and London 2012.
“This gold is quite significant for my career because for so many years I’ve dreamed about winning it,” said Ma, a 27-year-old left-hander.
“Jike and me both work and play together. We are competitors, but we are also brothers.
“In the past he was the best, he’s set a great example for me.”
Zhang said: “It was an honor to play against Ma here, I’m really happy he has the grand slam.”
Oscar-winning Hollywood actor Matthew McConaughey was in the crowd for the preceding bronze medal match, but he left before Ma and Zhang walked out to do battle.
If the screen idol had stayed he would have appreciated that the final lacked the edgeof-the-seat excitement of one of his screen hits, or for that matter the previous night’s women’s final in which Ding Ning edged Li Xiaoxia after seven electric games.
Nevertheless, it was a spectacular master class from Ma, who barely made a bad move against a strangely subdued Zhang, the second seed.
Ma prevailed in the opening game as the top two players on the planet sized each other up like stags waiting to lock horns.
The match ignited early in the second when Ma punched the air after his forehand smash put him 5-2 to the good.
He maintained his edge in that game to leave his teammate with plenty of work to do.
An exciting 13-stroke rally in the next set, with the ball seemingly glued to the bats, fell to Ma and moved him one game away from the title.
With Ma leading 3-0 in the fourth, Zhang called a strategic timeout in an effort to disrupt his compatriot’s rhythm.
The ploy didn’t work as a curiously error-strewed performance left him unable to mount a last ditch rally.
Zhang conceded he wasn’t at his best.
“I was trailing after the first game, and that made it difficult. I was a bit passive in the next three sets. But you can’t win everything, that’s the charm of sport,” he said.
China, which has now won 26 of 30 table tennis gold medals since the sport was introduced to the Olympics in 1988, is the hot favorite to claim the remaining two team titles at these Games.
Meanwhile, Ma will forever remember the brief but intense 37 minutes it took him to complete his slam.
Both Zhang and Ma are hugely popular in China, but it is the quirkier Zhang who tends to captivate the public more.
When a photo of Zhang sleeping right before an earlier Olympic match was posted online, the Chinese hashtag “WakeupZhangJike” hit No 3 at one point on Weibo, the popular Chinese microblogging site.
As for McConaughey, he clearly enjoyed the bronze medal match he witnessed in which Japan’s Jun Mizutani got the better of Belarus’ former world No 1 Vladimir Samsonov, 4-1.