Olmps

But in 1989, the unthinkable happened.. In the team event final at the World Championships in Dortmund, China was thrashed 5-0 by Sweden. .The coaches knew that what was holding the country’s table tennis back was the same force that was paralysing so much of national life – the omnipresent influence of Chairman Mao – but to say so in public was unthinkable..

In the 1950s, Mao had approved a coaching manual that had taken on the status of a holy document.. Unquestioned adherence to its doctrines, particularly its insistence on the use of the ‘distinctively Chinese’ penhold grip which only allowed one side of the bat to be used, had stultified the nation’s table tennis.. But at the start of the 1990s Deng Xiaoping began to put into practice his famous remark that ‘It doesn’t matter whether the cat is black or white as long as it catches mice..’ Suddenly the doors were opened to reform in all areas of Chinese life, ping pong included..

Leading players like Wang Liquin abandoned the sacred grip and the diminutive Deng Yaping occupied the number one spot in the women’s world rankings for the first eight years of the 1990s using a Western ‘shakehand’ grip.. She was later voted the greatest female Chinese athlete of the twentieth century.. Meanwhile, Liu Guoliang developed a swivel-wristed variant of the penhold that allowed him to use both sides of the bat, thus removing the one great weakness of the traditional grip.. By the time table tennis was established as an Olympic event, the top Chinese players were catching mice again with astonishing regularity..

Game On: Table Tennis Basics

Format

Olympic table tennis is a knock-out tournament,

with each nation permitted to enter up to three men and three women, with a maximum of two in each of the singles events..

Singles matches are the best of seven games, team matches

the best of five. A team contest consists of two singles matches followed by a doubles match, followed if necessary by up to two more singles matches until one team has chalked up three victories..

Rules

Each point begins with a service and ends when a

player fails to make a legitimate return..When a player serves, the ball must bounce once on each side of the net; all other shots during a rally must land on the opponent’s side only..As in lawn tennis, if a service clips the net but lands in play it is counted as a ‘let’ and the point is replayed, whereas if a shot clips the net during a rally play continues regardless..There is also a deuce system, which kicks in when both players are one point away from what would normally be a winning score..Thereafter, the first player to draw two points ahead wins the game.. Unlike in lawn tennis, volleys are not allowed and servers get only one attempt per point (barring ‘lets’)..

For most of the history of the sport 21 points were required to win a game but in 2001 the ITTF made the seismic decision to reduce the figure to 11, with service to alternate every 2 rather than 5 points..The consensus is that the changes have heightened the tension and drama in a sport which already had plenty of both..

A less well known aspect of the scoring system is the so called ‘expedite’ rule.. If a game is unfinished after ten minutes and both players have fewer than 9 points, service alternates for the remainder of the match and a receiver who makes thirteen good returns in a rally automatically wins the point..

Equipment

Americans know them as ‘paddles’, in europe the word

is ‘bat’ and the official ITTF terminology is ‘racket’.. Whatever they are called, in the quest for more spin and speed the devices used to hit table tennis balls have evolved dramatically since Hiroji Satoh first used his sponge-filled instrument in 1952..

The modern table tennis bat is rather like a sandwich..The core structure, known as the blade, must be 85 per cent wood, but the remaining 15 per cent gives plenty of scope for the use of other materials: carbon fibre, for example, stiffens a blade and gives it a bigger ‘sweet spot’..The ‘filling’ consists of a layer of sponge on either side of the blade, which can be thick, thin, hard or soft according to

player preference..The outer layers of the sandwich are formed by two thin pimpled sheets of rubber.. Depending on the precise petrochemical formula used in their manufacture, rubbers can impart varying degrees of spin and speed..They are usually adhered to the sponge layers with their smooth sides outward but ‘pimples-out’ rubbers are sometimes employed by players who specialise in neutralising their opponent’s spin or turning it against them..

It is perfectly legitimate, indeed normal, for players to use bats with completely different characteristics on each side..To help players ‘read’ their opponents’ shots, however, one of a bat’s surfaces must be black and the other red..

One aspect of bat technology which competitors in London will have to do without is speed glue, a volatile adhesive previously applied by many players to the underside of their top-sheets to make them springier and faster. . Following a couple of incidents in which spectators were

rendered unconscious by toxic vapours emanating from recently treated bats, the IOC outlawed its use after the Beijing Games..

The balls used in table tennis are made of celluloid and filled with gas. .They must bounce at least 23cm when dropped on to the table from a height of precisely 30..5cm..After the Sydney Games in 2000, the ITTF increased the diameter of regulation balls from 38 to 40mm, partly to make them more visible to television audiences and partly to slow the action down a notch..

Other key pieces of equipment include the table, which must be 2..74m (9ft) long, 1..525 m (5ft) wide and topped by a smooth, low-friction coating; the net is 15..25cm (6in) high; and players’ clothing must not be white, as this would make the ball difficult to see..

The Finer Points

Holds

There are two basic ways of holding a table tennis

bat. The penhold grip, beloved of players from China and north Asia, involves wrapping the thumb and index finger around the handle with their tips touching the front of the bat while the remaining fingers support its back.. Penhold grip players were restricted to using just one side of the racket until the 1990s, when the Chinese developed the reverse penhold backhand.. The shakehand grip, as its name implies, involves a player holding the bat as if he or she were shaking a hand..Traditionally the hold of choice of European and South Asian players, it has been growing in popularity worldwide as it makes backhand shots much easier to deliver than the penhold..

Service

As in tennis, the server has a significant advantage as

he or she can dictate the initial ‘shape’ of a rally..The high serve, initiated by the server tossing the ball up to four metres in the air, has become standard among top-class players..The ball gathers speed on its descent, enabling it to take more spin from the bat when the two connect.. Serves are usually given heavy side spin but on occasion a no-spin serve can be thrown into the mix to catch an opponent off-guard..

Spin

Spin is crucial. Topspin, executed through an upward

movement of the bat, causes the ball to dip then leap forward when

FooTwork

The role of footwork is easy to miss with so much

action going on above the table, but take a look beneath..The nimbleness required at this level is astonishing..

Playing Styles

Although top players vary their style according to

circumstance, they tend to have a ‘default setting’..They are usually categorised in terms of aggression and can generally be divided into those who play to win and those who play not to lose.. Fortunately, defensive play can be every bit as thrilling to watch as all-out attack.. As with many one-on-one sports, the most thrilling matches often involve players with contrasting styles..

Table Tennis Goes to the Olympics

Despite the global popularity of table tennis, it did

not feature in the Games until 1988. .This was largely down to ITTF founder Ivor Montagu, who ruled the sport for over forty years.. (He also produced several Hitchcock movies, worked as The Observer’s first film critic and allegedly spied for the Soviet Union..) Montagu was resolutely opposed to table tennis becoming an Olympic sport on the grounds that he already ran a perfectly good World Championship..

A further obstacle was the issue of professionalism.. As early as 1935, the ITTF had erased the distinction between professional and amateur players in its constitution, setting it at odds with the IOC’s insistence on amateurism.. It fell to Montagu’s successor, H.. Roy Evans, to make the necessary amendments to the ITTF’s constitution in 1979..Two years later, the IOC voted to admit table tennis into the Olympic fold.. Ironically, by the time the sport made its debut at the Seoul Games, the ‘amateurs only’ clause had been dropped from the IOC charter..

Four events were scheduled at Seoul: men’s and women’s singles and doubles..To no one’s astonishment, China captured gold in the women’s singles and men’s doubles, as they would go on

to do at every subsequent Olympics featuring those events.. (Men’s doubles was discontinued after 2004..) Rather more surprising were victories for South Korea in both the other events..

Further evidence that Chinese table tennis had allowed itself to be caught napping was provided by the country’s thrashing by Sweden at the 1989 World Championships..The presence of this new kid on the ping pong block was confirmed at Barcelona in 1992 when the great Swede Jan-Ove Waldner collected Olympic gold playing a dazzling close-to-the-table game.. Often described as the Mozart of the sport,Waldner is as big a celebrity in China as in his native country.. He owns a restaurant in Beijing called the W Bar and has acquired the affectionate Chinese nickname Lao Wan (‘the evergreen tree’)..

These humiliations, combined with a new openness to foreign influences, finally spurred the Chinese coaches into amending their game..They dropped their insistence on the unreconstructed penhold grip and dispatched the top players’ training partners to study the playing styles of the best Europeans. .The new approach has certainly paid off: aside from South Korean Ryu Seung-Min’s victory in the men’s singles in 2004, Chinese players have won every Olympic gold medal since Barcelona..

Why Watch Taekwondo?

Taekwondo is one of the most popular martial arts,

and one of the fastest growing: it has been around for less than sixty years but there are already an estimated 60m practitioners, including the American action movie actor Chuck Norris and Buffy the Vampire Slayer star Sarah Michelle Gellar, both of whom are black belts.. If you like your sport aggressive, taekwondo could be right up your street.. It is spectacular, lightning-quick and brutal – which is why contestants wear head and body protectors..Yet, with its graceful movements and super-high kicks, it also has a balletic quality..These elements combine to form what can seem like a video game transmuted into reality..

Aside from its inherent attractions, taekwondo offers a fascinating way in to the culture of Korea – the history of the sport is intimately entwined with that of the nations.. Don’t expect to see momentous clashes between North and South though: the North Koreans practise taekwondo in a form slightly different from the version sanctioned by the IOC..

The Story of Taekwondo

Although the ancient fighting arts of the Korean

peninsula undoubtedly fed into the development of taekwondo, the sport is essentially a modern invention, amalgamating elements of Japanese karate and Chinese kung fu. . It came into existence formally on 11 April 1955, when the masters of several South Korean kwan (martial art schools) agreed to merge their styles into a new, unified discipline, to be known as tae soo do.. Two years later, at the instigation of General Choe Hong Hi, the name was changed to taekwondo to foster a sense of continuity with taekkyeon, a martial art developed during the first half of the first millennium..

Although little is known about its precise techniques during this era, taekkyeon was a subset of subak, a leg-oriented fighting system that emerged in Goguryeo, one of the three kingdoms that shared