Olmps

Shall We Dance? Competitive Formats

The Olympic competitions are between pairs of dancers

(duets) and eight-women teams.. In both events, participants perform

a technical routine and a free routine, each around four

minutes long. .The technical competition involves a set series of moves and lifts, whereas in the free competition the choreography is created by the swimmers..

Art and Industry: Judging and Scoring

Each routine is scored by ten judges. Five judges grade

the technical qualities and five the artistic qualities..Technical crite-

ria include the degree of synchronisation, the precision of

movement and the difficulty of the routine..Artistic crite-

ria, although voluminously detailed in the regulations, remain at best a grey area: points are scored for – among other things – flair, creativity and feel for the music..

After the five judges have given their scores, the highest and lowest are discounted and the three remaining scores are averaged.. The final score for each routine is calculated by multiplying the technical score by six and the artistic score by four, with the results added to give a maximum of 100..A team or duo’s total for the competition is determined by adding the scores for the two routines together, with the free routine counting for more than the technical one (they are multiplied by 0..65 and 0..35 respectively).. Anyone still with us?

The Finer Points

Just for Show: Deckwork

Routines begin on the pool side with elaborate waving

and diving – this is called deckwork and it does not have to be synchronised.. Great as it is, the judges are instructed not to include deckwork in their scoring..

Look Ma, No Goggles

The only equipment allowed, apart from swimsuits

and gelatine (to keep the hair in place), are nose clips: amazingly, synchronised swimmers manage their complex manoeuvres underwater without the aid of goggles..

Moves and Grooves

There are three main components to any synchronised

swimming routine: positions, movements and lifts. . Positions or postures generally involve competitors sticking their legs in the air in some way. . Judges will be looking for precision of movement and the synchronicity of the team. . Movements are structured series of positions that move the athletes forward, like the walk, or allow them to descend gracefully, like the barracuda.. Underwater speakers help athletes keep time with the music and with each other..

The most dramatic elements of the sport are the lifts..All of them have one designated base – the member of the team on which the lift is built - plus a flyer, a lighter member who is lifted up on the back of the base..The rest of the team are the pushers, who swim around the base and lift the flyer up out of the water.. Flyers are increasingly likely to perform acrobatic dismounts at the end of lifts..

Synchronised Swimming

Goes to the Olympics

It’s been a long haul for synchronised swimming: five

Olympic exhibition performances, starting with Helsinki 1952, and a global tour by the US synchronised swimming team in 1960 to promote the sport finally paid off with its full medal debut at the 1984 Los Angeles Games..At the next three Olympics the USA and Canada won all the solo and duet events..Atlanta 1996 was the high point for the US team: performing on home soil, they won the gold medal with a series of perfect scores..

This long period of North American dominance was broken in Sydney 2000, where the Russians took both golds. .They have held on to them ever since, exploiting the nation’s strong

THE World TURNED UPSIDE DOWN: RUSSIA’S Women At SYDNEY 2000

background in artistic disciplines such as ballet and acrobatics. . They also introduced new hybrid figures and higher lifts, performing at speeds that no one knew were possible..

Trailing in the Russians’ wake, other nations have been scrambling for the minor medals, resorting to the most extraordinary themes and costumes..The trend was initiated by the Japanese at the 1995 World Championship with a routine entitled ‘re-enactment of the Kobe earthquake’..The French team at the 1996 Games did a lot of damage to the sport’s reputation when they planned a performance on the theme of the holocaust.. Dressed in black bathing suits, team members were to goose-step to the side of the pool before re-enacting, in the water, the arrival of Jewish women in the death camps, the selection by Nazi doctors and the final march to the gas chambers.. In the end, after much protest, they thought again..

The USA duo at Athens 2004 mined Greek mythology for inspiration, appearing in swimsuits adorned with sequinned snakes and performing movements that were meant to suggest the Medusa.. In 2008, the Spanish duet team took things a stage further, working for months to perfect a swimsuit with built-in fairy lights, batteries and circuit breakers.. Unfortunately, the sports ruling body deemed them unacceptable..

TABLE TENNIS

28 July–8 August 2012

ExCeL Arena

Athletes: 172 | Golds up for grabs: 4

Olympic presence

Became an Olympic sport in 1988.

Olympic Format

Straight knock-out tournaments for men’s and wom-

en’s singles and teams,seeded according to ITTFWorld Rankings.. In the team competitions (which replaced the doubles event after Athens 1988) teams of three players play between them four singles matches and one doubles match per round..

Contenders:

The Chinese will consider anything less than a clean

sweep of the gold medals a failure..The ranking tables show why: the top five women and four of the five top men are Chinese. . The one exception is Germany’s Timo Boll, currently the second ranked male..

Past Champions:

China: 20 | South Korea: 3 | Sweden: 1

Why Watch Table Tennis?

At the elite level, table tennis has the speed and intensity

of a martial art.. It has become so fast,in fact,with balls flying around at over 70mph, that it is hard to follow for the uninitiated.. But the pace is precisely what makes it so thrilling..

Despite its bewildering speed, top-class table tennis is a game of great subtlety.. It is all about sending your opponent the wrong way, mentally as well as physically, and to do this you need plenty of tricks in the locker. .Among these are disguise, a knack for

second-guessing and a facility for suddenly changing tactics

mid-point.. Quick footwork is also essential..The most important element, however, is spin – both delivering it and reading and utilising your opponent’s..The best players can seemingly make the ball defy the laws of physics..

The sport has also acquired a small but intriguing place in global popular culture..The cheapness of its basic equipment and the relatively small space required for the table has made it a staple of youth clubs everywhere and a favourite of groups as diverse as Premiership footballers and the Zen warrior monks of contemporary Tokyo..Table tennis has even made its impact on cinema, featuring notably in Forrest Gump and the cult Japanese movie Ping Pong..

The Story of Table Tennis

‘Ping pong’s coming home!’ quipped London mayor

Boris Johnson after taking possession of the Olympic flag at the end of the Beijing Games..The genius of his remark was that it managed to be cheekily flattering to his hosts, yet true..Table tennis was indeed born on the dining tables of Victorian Britain but it is in East Asia that it has found its spiritual home, as China’s domination of the 2008 competition had just confirmed..

According to table tennis lore, the sport was invented by a group of British officers in India (or possibly South Africa) in 1881.. Looking for after-dinner entertainment, they carved a champagne cork into a ball and started hitting it over a net made of cigarbox lids..They brought the game back home to England, where it proved a big hit among the upper classes..At this stage, the embryonic sport went by such splendid onomatopoeic names as ‘whiff waff’ and ‘flim flam’, and was frequently played with a golf ball..

In 1891 John Jacques of London introduced a game called Gossima, played with long-handled racquets that had drum-like

SPIN DOCTOR: FIDEL CASTRo PLAYING BARE CHEST PING PONG, 1963

heads of stretched parchment, but a general problem with such early forms of table tennis was the poor quality of the projectiles.. This was resolved in 1900 by the introduction of hollow cel- luloid balls, which bounced predictably, offered the possibility of spin, and sped the game up dramatically.. Sensing the beginning of a full-blown craze, John Jacques reintroduced Gossima as ‘Ping Pong’..The firm also moved quickly to trademark the name – by now the standard term for the sport – and sold the American rights to Parker Brothers.. Henceforth, competitors in any event that described itself as ‘ping pong’ were legally obliged to use Jacques/ Parker equipment..

This restriction might have strangled the sport in its infancy had not a group of free-spirited enthusiasts decided to form an association based on the generic name ‘table tennis’.. The Table Tennis Association, formed in England in 1901, just four days before the establishment of the rival Ping Pong Association, is the direct ancestor of the ITTF (InternationalTableTennis Federation), the body that governs the sport today..

Although it remained popular in parts of Eastern Europe, where it had penetrated during the ‘ping pong’ days, the initial craze for table tennis quickly burned out elsewhere.. But by the early 1920s a revival was underway, particularly in Britain, where the laws of the game were codified..This organisational effort was spearheaded by a colourful aristocrat named Ivor Montagu, who was the prime mover behind the establishment of the ITTF in 1926..The first World Championships were held during the same year. .All the medals went to Hungarians, who would go on to dominate the championships for most of the pre-war period, with Viktor Barna and Maria Mednyanszky each collecting five singles titles.. A young Fred Perry, of future lawn tennis and shirt fame, was the only non-Hungarian to win one of the first nine men’s World Championships..

The period between 1926 and 1952 is often described as the ‘hard bat’ era, because bats then consisted simply of thin sheets of pimpled rubber stuck on to plywood blades..They offered little scope for spin and lacked spring, making the sport considerably slower than it is today..The route to victory was guile, with players working relentlessly to manoeuvre their opponents out of position.. Rallies could be interminable – one at the 1936 World Championships lasted over two hours.. Nevertheless, there are those who still hanker after this simpler, purer form of the game, as witnessed by a recent rise in the number of ‘old school’ hard bat clubs in the USA and Western Europe..

Everything changed in 1952..At that year’s World Championships, Hiroji Satoh of Japan blew away all-comers with a bat that, in the words of one commentator, resembled a handheld mattress.. Featuring a thick layer of sponge between the blade and the pimpled rubber surface, it enabled Satoh to hit shots with speed

THE WEIGH-IN: TABLE TENNIS BALls MUST TIP THE SCALes At 2.7g

and spin that his opponents could only dream of.. His victory in the tournament triggered a technological arms race in which ever more sophisticated combination bats were developed, transforming the sport for ever..

Satoh’s triumph was also significant for ushering in an era of Asian supremacy that has continued ever since, aside from a brief period in the late 1980s and early 1990s..The dominant force, however, would not be Japan but China.. Ominously for the rest of the table tennis world, Mao Zedong had recently declared pinpang qiu the national sport.. It was an idiosyncratic choice – table tennis had made little impact on China prior to the Communist Revolution

– but an inspired one..The game required little space or expensive equipment and its emphasis on quick reflexes and nimble movement fitted the Chinese psyche perfectly..The sport was also ruled by an organisation that, almost uniquely among global bodies of the era, was prepared to admit the People’s Republic into its ranks.. It therefore offered a rare opportunity for Chinese sporting success on the world stage..

Once Mao had his heart set on table tennis glory, concrete tables were constructed everywhere from collective farms to suburban railway stations..The effort paid off.. In 1959, a mere six years after

China’s admission to the ITTF, Rong Guotuan won the World Championship, becoming the first Chinese national to hold such a title in any sport..The country went table tennis crazy..

Chinese dominance might have continued unabated had not Mao decided to unleash the chaos of the Cultural Revolution. . Missing the 1967 and 1969 World Championships was the least of the worries of the nation’s top players during this period, in which three of them were hounded into suicide by the Red Guards.. Nevertheless, when it suited Mao’s political interests to rehabilitate the sport after a six-year hiatus, the top Chinese players were able to pick up more or less where they had left off..

Ping Pong Diplomacy

As the 1960s drew to a close, China and the USA had many reasons for wanting to cosy up. China had been devastated economically by the Cultural Revolution and the Mao regime was desperate that it,

rather than the exiled government inTaiwan,should be recognised by the international community. US President Richard Nixon, meanwhile, badly needed China onside for his planned withdrawal fromVietnam. He also recognised that closer relations with Beijing would strengthen his hand in negotiations with the Soviets.The problem was that neither side could admit to wanting a rapprochement without losing face.What was needed was a ‘chance encounter’ which could be exploited to pave the way for future discussions.Opportunities were limited – the two superpowers had broken off diplomatic relations in 1949 and contact of any kind between Chinese and American citizens was extremely rare – but there was one international body to which both nations still belonged: the International

Table Tennis Federation.

And so it was that the chance encounter took place at the World Championships in Nagoya, Japan. On 4 April 1971, nineteen-year-old Glenn Cowan, a member of the US team with hippyish tendencies, found himself stranded after a training session and jumped on to the People’s Republic team bus to grab a lift. Initially, the Chinese players were as dumbfounded as if a Martian had appeared in their midst.There were several minutes of awkward silence but eventually the team captain

PIGGY IN THE MIDDLE: ZHOU ENLAI AND RICHARD NIXON OUTMANOEUVRING Taiwanese LEADER CHIANG KAI SHEK THRough ‘PING PONG DIPLOMACY’

Zhuang Zedong walked up to Cowan with an interpreter and presented him with a silk painting of the Huangshan Mountains. Cowan rummaged around in his bag for a suitable gift but all he could find was a comb, so he promised to reciprocate with something more appropriate the next day (a ‘Let It Be’T-shirt, as it transpired).

By the time the coach pulled into its destination,the world’s media had assembled to cover this seminal moment in Sino-American relations.One journalist asked Cowan whether he would like to visit China.‘Of course,’ the athlete replied.From then on,things moved remarkably quickly.Within two days, Mao had ordered the Chinese team to invite their American counterparts to Beijing. Less than a week after the bus incident, the US table tennis team crossed from Hong Kong to the Chinese mainland to commence a week-long tour. Four days later, the US government lifted a twenty-year trade embargo on China and in February 1972 Richard Nixon paid his historic visit to Beijing.The GreatThaw had begun.

Well,that’s the story,at least.It later transpired that Premier Zhou Enlai had raised the possibility of inviting the US to compete in China at a high level meeting held seventeen days before the World Championships began.