World Championships

Women’s Doubles at the Worlds

By Tim Boggan

“For us,” said the Director of the Chinese Administration Center of Table Tennis and Badminton—that’s a burnished Cai Zhenhua, looking, all suited-up, like a fashion model and/or movie idol—“success is synonymous with a sweep,” nothing less than all five titles. So come the Women’s Doubles semi’s, how were the Chinese doing?

Pretty good. The favorites, Wang Nan/Zhang Yining, hadn’t yet lost a game. Fortunately, for those in the vast minority wanting to watch a variety of earlier matches in which the ubiquitous Chinese were not playing, exciting opportunities arose. Koreans Lee Hyang Mi/Moon Hyun Jung won a 12-10 in the 7^th squeaker from the Belarus team of Tatyana Kostromina/Viktoria Pavlovich, and Japan’s Ai Fujinuma/Ai Fukuhara rallied from 3-1 down to 3, 3, 7 increasingly demoralize Singapore’s Li Jia Wei/Xu Yan. World #33 Fujinuma, who also got to the quarter’s of the Mixed, was asked to play only doubles here—the better, I presume, for Japan to take advantage of her lefty strengths. Quarter’s play saw two teams from Hong Kong (touted now as China’s Hong Kong, China’s Chinese) battling it out, assuring one of them a semi’s match with Wang/Zhang. Tie Yana, former University Games winner over Zhang Yining and Niu Jianfeng, and her partner, Zhang Rui, needed but 5 games to advance (though earlier they’d wobbled victorious out of a 17-15 in the 6^th match with Taipei Chinese Huang I-Hwa/Lu Yun-feng).

On the other side of the Draw, China semi’s arrivals, World #29 Bai Yang (a doubles specialist with pips on the backhand) and her experienced partner (7 years on the National team) Guo Yan, haven’t given up a game. But their quarter’s opponents, Hungary’s Csilla Batorfi/Krisztina Toth, now playing in their 12^th year as partners, had a tumultuous 14-12 in the 7^th win over the Italian pair, Nicoletta Stefanova and 33-year-old Tan Monfardini Wening.

No problem of course with China’s Guo Yue/Niu Jianfeng getting to the semi’s over Tamara Boros/Cornelia Vaida who’d blitzed our Gao Jun/Jasna Reed. Earlier this Herzogovina team had been surprised to find themselves playing not the North Koreans Kim Jong/Ko Un Gyong but the South Koreans Kim Kyung Ak/Kim Soong Sil who, all but beaten, had -12, -5, -9, 9, 8, 10, 12 rallied in quite spectacular fashion. (Little wonder our Tawny Banh/Jackie Lee couldn’t begin to out-toughen them, even for a game.)

In the one semi’s, Olympic Champs Wang/Zhang’s match is delayed 15 minutes because, so I was told, a racket or rackets intended for use by the Tie/Zhang team showed toxic glue (could the rubber itself have such an ingredient in it?). As the match proceeds, China’s Olympians lead 2-1. Both pairs play very poorly in the 4^th while rose bouquets brought in by front row cheering fans on being held aloft and shaken, begin dropping individual flowers. Wang/Zhang, up 3-1 and at deuce in the 5th, have a chance to end the match, but lose 13-11. This, however, just delays the inevitable.

In the other, Bai Yang/Guo Yan vs. Guo Yue/Niu Jianfeng semi’s, at 9-all in the 1^st, and from there on in, the players echo and re-echo (from my point of view to a fault) what they’d seen Wang/Zhang do, indulge in game-delaying strategy talk. Under-the-table hand signals aren’t enough now; point after point, both pairs whisper to their respective partners, shielding with their rackets their presumably readable lips. Again and again the umpires allow play to be interrupted so. I myself thought that these conversations, among familiars whose games are so well known to one another, were staged for dramatic effect, and still think so, though U.S. Coach Danny Seemiller assured me the players were in earnest—talking, changing point by changing point, of exact spins to be given or taken at pin-point positions about the table. Anyway, for the fans, not whispers but shouts (“CHIN-a! CHIN-a!”) accompanied Guo/Niu’s 4-0 advance.

 In the final, it was inconceivable to me that such a venerated pair as Wang/Zhang could lose. Table Tennis World’s tournament Program, occasionally giving us details from a player’s history we’d never get at guarded Press Conferences (“Only after she [Wang] had enough ball practice was she allowed a cup of water by her father”), shows the hard work these Champions had put in since early childhood. Opening and closing with lopsided 11-4 wins, Wang/Zhang 4-1 successfully defended their 2003 Championship. Thus China not only made history when Zhang won “China’s 100^th summer Olympics gold medal” in Athens, but did so again—now having in the last half century, with Wang Liqin’s equally successful repeat of his 2001 Men Singles title, reached the 100 gold medal mark in World Championship competition.