BEIJING — Anybody wanting to discover the secret of China's success at table tennis need only meet Li Zhuoming, a 10-year-old prodigy.
With a paddle in his hand, he is bursting with explosive energy; off the court he is uncommonly poised for a pre-adolescent. He holds his 4-foot-11 body erect when he speaks and makes eye contact. Except when wiping the beads of sweat dripping under his crisp bush cut, he doesn't fidget. Table tennis, known as pingpang in China, isn't a game for the inattentive.
Zhuoming practically emerged from the womb with a paddle. His father is a coach; his mother a retired player, who started teaching him at an age when most toddlers could do little more than toss a ball around the playground. He now boards at the Xuanwu Sports School in Beijing, where he wakes daily at 6:30 a.m., for a rigorous curriculum that includes math, Chinese, English and six hours of table tennis.
And for fun?
"Well, of course, play pingpang," said Zhuoming, who acknowledges enjoying an occasional video game and the Harry Potter movies.
The game is taken very seriously in China. National champions such as Wang Hao and Wang Liqin command as much celebrity as basketball's Yao Ming. President Hu Jintao told reporters this month that if he could be an Olympic athlete he would surely pick table tennis as his sport.
Since table tennis became an Olympic sport in 1988, the Chinese have taken home 16 of the 20 gold medals.
Not only do the Chinese rule at international meets, they are often competing against former countrymen. All four U.S. players here for the Beijing Games were born in China, including one who won a silver medal previously -- for China.
"Without us, the level [of play in the U.S.] is so low," said Gao Jun, who won a silver medal in 1992 and four years later became an American citizen. "They use Chinese players because they can get good results quickly."
South Korea, Japan, Singapore, Argentina, Ukraine, Australia, Croatia, Luxembourg, Spain, the Netherlands, Austria, Poland and Congo are among the countries that have ethnic Chinese players on their teams, some of whom immigrated only recently. The dominance of the Chinese players has caused some consternation in Canada, where three of the four members of the Olympic table tennis team are Chinese born.
"There's something unseemly about gold medalists who have rarely stepped foot on their 'home' country's soil, who might not know the words to the national anthem or speak the official language(s)," complained a Vancouver Sun columnist recently.
