He was referring to a famous episode in 1971, during the World Table Tennis Championships, held in Japan, when an American player named Glenn Cowan stayed late at a practice and missed the United States bus to his hotel. Because one of your players got on the bus of the Chinese team.” “But the story starts before that, with table tennis. “In 1972, your former president, Nixon, visited China, and after this visit, we started the normal relationship between the two countries,” said Zhen, a 30-year-old in a dark polo shirt. Here’s which essential topping she says should come before the other.īut as quickly as the game was deemed an enemy of the state, it was rehabilitated and played a key role in China’s first and tentative steps out of international isolation. Jam or Cream First?: A Londoner spent 10 years sampling scones across Britain.‘Global Britain’ No More: Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has dropped Boris Johnson’s bombastic approach to foreign policy, reflecting Britain’s changed global status.Lockdown Parties: A day before he was due to testify before a committee investigating violations of Covid rules, Boris Johnson conceded that he had misled the British Parliament about lockdown-breaking parties while he was prime minister.A Damning Report: A new independent report found London’s police force to be institutionally sexist, misogynistic, racist and homophobic.The country’s success culminated in the drubbing it gave the rest of the world at the Beijing Games, when the Chinese won bronze, silver and gold in both the men’s and women’s singles, and gold in both the men’s and women’s teams. Though in the years since the invention of whiff-waff, as the British initially called it, many of the game’s great triumphs were accomplished in China, or at least produced by China’s deep roster. “And I say to the Chinese and I say to the world, Ping-Pong is coming home!” “London is the sporting capital of the world,” he bellowed with a professorial wave of the hand. At a party in 2008 to hand the Olympic flag to the British, Mayor Boris Johnson of London stood before an audience and proudly recounted those facts, and a few others. Table tennis was invented in England in the 19th century as an after-dinner pastime for elites, who used the tops of cigar boxes for paddles and books for nets. The four gleaming courts at the competition, set in the middle of a 6,000-seat arena, were made in Shanghai by a company called Double Happiness Sports.įor anyone familiar with the game’s history, it’s a turn of events that is tickling. LONDON - Beijing is about 5,000 miles from London, but when it comes to table tennis, the Chinese athletes are playing with a home-court advantage.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |