Rings Rodge: An American's Guide to Olympic Table Tennis

Part 1 of our Olympic preview series discusses why we call it "table tennis" and not ping-pong and explores the Soviet spy who helped set the stage for Olympic table tennis

This is part 1 of RINGS RODGE, a roughly 15-part series where Olympics obsessive and journalist Rodger Sherman breaks down a different sport every day heading up to the 2024 Paris Olympics. You can probably get serious previews of the most popular sports on other sites… here, we’re doing unserious previews of sports that aren’t regularly on TV in between the four years between Olympics. Rodger didn’t really time things right so he’s not going to be able to get to all the sports BUT HE’S GOING TO TRY HIS BEST TO DO AS MANY AS POSSIBLE.

Today: TABLE TENNIS!

Why should we care about Olympic Table Tennis?

To me, table tennis is the sport which best explains why the Olympics are fascinating.

Every four years, somebody gets on Twitter and goes viral for saying “they should put a regular guy out there doing all the events so we can see how much better the athletes are!” And it’s true. It’s difficult to contextualize just how exceptional Olympians are when we watch their sports once every four years, and only see the greatest in the sport. You’d probably drown between the sixth and seventh lap of the 4x100 individual medley, but the Olympics makes the 13th-best swimmer in that event look pedestrian when they’re actually one of the best athletes on the planet.

But until we nominate an official Average Human to do the decathlon… watch table tennis. Sure, when you put on the Olympics, you expect to see people soaring and flipping and hurdling, not a game we can play in our basements. But when you watch the world’s best ping-pongers pinging and ponging, you realize it’s exactly as impressive as the people soaring and flipping and hurdling.

You’ve played this sport before. You know how good you are. You have a vague idea of how you’d try to win a ping-pong point if there were $10 on the line. And then you see high-level competition between the best players in the world, and you immediately recognize that it’s on a different level.

Table tennis Olympians combine stunning reflexes and elite hand-eye coordination with a mind capable of making correct strategic decisions in milliseconds—and perhaps most importantly, years of devoted training in a sport most never take seriously.

The Olympics are a demonstration of human greatness. Table tennis may be the humblest sport in the games, but it shows that when people dedicate their minds and bodies to chasing perfection in a seemingly mundane task, they can achieve brilliance.

And you know what? It would be kinda fun to watch a guy named Steve from the Chicago suburbs get absolutely flambéed by a table tennis god whipping the ball across the table at 70 mph with spin. It’d be less dangerous than sending Steve out there for equestrian or sailing.

So who’s good?

The short answer: China.

The long answer: China for gold, China, for silver, and then somebody else for the bronze because they only let China bring two players in the singles competitions. Chinese table tennis dominance is right up there with American basketball dominance. They’ve won 32 of 37 all-time Olympic golds in table tennis, including clean sweeps of every gold medal in every Olympics from 2008 to 2016. (Japan ended the streak with a mixed doubles gold in Tokyo.) The top four athletes in the world rankings on both the men’s and women’s sides are Chinese.

There is one way for everybody else to compete: Naturalizing Chinese-born players. At the Rio games, 44 of 172 total competitors were born in China—and only six were representing China, a significantly higher proportion of naturalized athletes than any other Olympic sport. (I got the sense that Wang Jianan was not a traditional Congolese name.) However, it hasn’t resulted in medals for everybody else—after all, these players generally leave China because they don’t think they have a shot at making the Chinese team.

Can’t we just call it “ping-pong?”

I always assumed the international competitive version of the sport was called “table tennis” instead of ping-pong to make it sound fancier and more legitimate—like how it’s called Water Polo and not Swimmy Soccer or Splish-Splosh. (I always kinda thought “polo” implied, you know, horses. But I digress.)

The actual reason international ping-pong is called “table tennis” has to do with overzealous trademark enforcement rather than the attempted appearance of legitimacy. In the 1800s, the sport was colloquially called table tennis and ping-pong and whiff-whaff. (I’m a bit pissed we missed on Olympic Whiff-Whaff.)

But the board game company Parker Brothers snatched up the trademark for Ping-Pong, using it to sell rackets and nets and balls. They argued that Ping-Pong was the name of a game they held the rights to, just like Monopoly and Clue—and everybody not paying Parker Brothers was playing some other game. So when the sport was organized internationally in 1926, they had to call it the International Table Tennis Federation or risk going toe-to-toe with the Uncle Moneybags in court. I had it backwards all these years: I thought ping-pong was the slangy casual term for the sophisticated Olympic sport of table tennis, but table tennis is actually the store brand version of ping-pong.

This confusion does not seem to be an issue in China—in Chinese, table tennis is 乒乓球 or “pingpangqiu,” which is obviously more “ping pong” than “table tennis.” Plus the characters kinda look like a ping-pong table, although this was purely coincidental.

Why is China so damn good?

Broadly, the same reason they’re good in diving, gymnastics, swimming, and so many other sports—they’ve got 1.5 billion people, a massive economy, and a sports bureaucracy which invests money and resources to ID-ing and training potential medal-winners from a young age.

But also, table tennis holds a strangely prominent place in modern Chinese political history. The “ping-pong diplomacy” episode in the 1970s famously de-thawed political tensions between the United States and China, but the story begins before that.

No Chinese player won a World Championship in table tennis until 1959, but the sport was championed by Mao, who enjoyed table tennis and called it Among his writings is an extremely enthusiastic comment on a how-to table tennis article: “What he talks about is a ball game; what we can learn from it are theory, politics, economy, culture, and military affairs.” He had a friend in Ivor Montagu, a British banking heir, movie producer and ping-pong obsessive who founded the International Table Tennis Federation in 1926 and served as president for 40 years… and was, notably, a passionate Communist who was at one point recruited as a Soviet spy. (Being president of an international sports organization is an extremely good cover for being a spy.) He saw a simple, low-cost game that can be played by pretty much everyone as an ideal sport for a communist world.

After China saw success at the 1959 championship, Montagu gave the 1961 championships to Beijing. China invested heavily in building a winning team, hoping to distract the world from its ongoing famine. The Chinese team won three gold medals and were feted as national heroes, clearly establishing the sport as a point of Chinese pride. By the time table tennis became an Olympic sport in 1988, China’s complete dominance was well-established.

Are there any GOATs in these Olympics?

Ma Long from—you guessed it—China. He won the singles competitions in Rio and Tokyo while running off back-to-back-to-back World Championships from 2015 to 2019. He’s one of just five men to have completed the “grand slam” of table tennis (Olympics, World Champs, World Cup) and the only man with multiple wins in each of those events.

Unfortunately, he won’t have a chance to three-peat in Paris—as the fourth-ranked player in the world, there are three Chinese competitors ranked higher than him, and China is more interested in winning golds than aging GOATs. He is participating in the team event, which will almost certainly allow him to win his sixth Olympic gold.

Does Team USA have a shot at a medal?

No, sadly. No American has ever medaled, with the high-water mark coming in 2008 when Wang Chen made the quarterfinals in the women’s tournament. Kanak Jha on the men’s side and Lily Zhang on the women’s side have both been ranked in the top 25, so it’s not ridiculous to imagine them going on a lil run, but this is one of the least likely sports for an American medal.

However, I remain DISGUSTED with the ROBBERY of Team USA in the recent World Championships, their last hope at qualifying a men’s team for these games. Team USA had a chance at advancing to the knockout rounds of the tournament when Jishan Liang’s victory over a Kazakh opponent was wiped out because his racket was too thick. Apparently, table tennis people are extremely serious about ensuring rackets meet specifications—a video of a German ITTF official thoroughly inspecting the width, concavity, and chemical composition of a racket has racked up 3 million views on an “Unintentional ASMR” account.

China has a leg up for now, but as soon as our brave American boys get to use our beefy, corn-fed, American rackets, the rest of the world will need to watch out.