5 Things We Learnt From The Olympic Table Tennis Singles Event

Wow. What a breathtaking Olympic Singles week that was across both the Men’s and Women’s events.

On the Men’s side, we saw the Gold go to China, but the Silver heading to Sweden as Truls Moregardh produced one of the biggest Olympic shocks of all time by knocking out Wang Chuqin before pushing Fan Zhendong hard in the final.

On the Women’s side, we saw continued Chinese domination of table tennis as China took both the Gold and Silver medals. Chen Meng prevailed over the in-form Sun Yingsha for her 2nd Olympic title, a feat completed by so few in history.

Here are the 5 things we learnt from the event (from a coach and long-time table tennis fan).

The Chinese Men’s Team Are Beatable

For the first time since 2004, the Men’s Singles final wasn’t contested by two Chinese players.

It was the first time since 1992 that the Chinese failed to take home 2 medals in this event.

That’s how monumental Truls Moregardh’s victory over Wang Chuqin was, with the favorite being knocked out in the Round of 32. Truls embodied the spirit of the only non-Asian Gold Medal winner in Men’s singles, Jan-Ove Waldner, to produce some electric displays to reach the final.

Add on the trouble Fan Zhendong had against both Japan’s Tomokazu Harimoto and Moregardh, then you have a potential recipe for a shake-up of Men’s table tennis for years to come.

Both Truls and his fellow podium-standing European, Felix Lebrun, bring something a bit unique to the table with their non-traditional styles of play. This should inspire a huge amount of confidence in players around the world to lean into their unique style rather than conforming to traditional technique.

You just have to watch the final to see how impactful the chop block (blocking a ball with side/back spin) was against Fan, with the shot being rarely seen across the professional Men’s game. Truls made it work time and time again as he nearly upset the odds.

All that being said, Fan Zhendong will still be taking the Gold medal back to China. He avoided the ignominy of losing 2 Olympic finals like his mentor Wang Hao (who lost 3 in a row), and cemented his legacy as one of the all-time greats of modern table tennis.

The men might be beatable, but they aren’t beaten just yet.

In Contrast, The Chinese Women’s Team Are Unbeatable

Here’s what I said before the tournament even started (in our Paris 2024 draw/brackets/results article):

“There’s an exceptionally high chance of Sun Yingsha and Chen Meng meeting each other in the final, and they won’t be in any mood to put that at risk.”

Sun Yingsha didn’t drop a single game until the final, scoring 232 points to her opponent’s 129. Chen Meng started slowly against Sweden’s Linda Bergstrom and the Netherland’s Britt Eerland but still comfortably won those matches 4-1.

There was never a shadow of a doubt that the Gold and Silver medals would belong to China. Even Bronze-medal winning Hina Hayata of Japan lost 4-0 (11-6, 11-8, 11-6, 11-2) against Silver-winning Sun Yingsha.

The only real surprise was Chen Meng beating her compatriot with a repeat scoreline from the Tokyo Olympics.

Even though Chen was entering as the reigning champion, she had been looking short of ideas in losing multiple times to Sun over the last couple of years. As the dominant force, and a huge fan favorite, the match was expected to be Sun’s procession to Olympic gold.

Instead, Chen joins the greats Zhang Yining and Deng Yaping as multiple-Gold medal winning athletes in the Women’s Singles. What an incredible achievement.

The French Have 2 Future Stars On Their Hands

Every time I watched the tournament, the arena appeared to be full of fans cheering on athletes of all nations. However, as is often the case with table tennis, it was commonly the Chinese fans cheering the loudest whenever their representatives were playing.

That shifted dramatically as Felix and Alexis Lebrun started winning matches and putting themselves in medal contention.

Whilst Alexis’s defeat at the hands of Brazil’s Huge Calderano in the Round of 16 put the brakes on French dreaming temporarily, it was to be his 17-year old brother who avenged his brother’s defeat by beating the same opponent 4-0 in a dramatic bronze medal match.

The French crowd played a huge role in reversing recent form between the Frenchman and Brazilian, with Felix having never taken a game off Hugo before. The “thrill from Brazil” Calderano seemed rattled as Felix dominated from the first to last point, earning France’s first Olympic table tennis medal since 1992 (Jean-Philippe Gatien’s Silver).

With the two Lebrun brothers, France has two worthy successors to players like Simon Gauzy and Emmanuel Lebesson. They’ll be challenging for world titles aplenty over the years to come.

I’ve no doubt they’ll be even more successful if the French public get behind them just like they did for Felix as he put on a Bronze-medal winning masterclass.

Olympic Broadcasters Should Be Ashamed

I have two major grips about the Olympic broadcasters (globally) and their treatment of table tennis as a sport.

The first applies primarily to the USA broadcaster Peacock who decided it was fully appropriate to show table tennis as a 4-way split screen using low-quality streams. The audio coverage came from just one of the screens, with no way to watch individual streams.

The Olympics is one of the major opportunities for table tennis to gain popularity across the general population and accelerate new players into watching / playing the sport.

That’s why it’s incredibly disappointing that one of the world’s biggest and richest markets broadcast table tennis in a way that makes it terrible to watch. 

Most people who actually wanted to watch the table tennis event have resorted to using VPNs into Australia where at least Channel 9 has free-to-air streams of all four tables. Try asking a casual viewer to do that.

The other major problem has been a lack of interesting, engaging commentators. When you compare table tennis to tennis, this is one of the biggest differentiators. Tennis commentary brings in excellent broadcasters and sporting stars who share unique perspectives on the on-court action.

Table tennis, on the other hand, has just a handful of strong commentators (shout out to the excellent Adam Bobrow) who can’t commentate every match, and aren’t available across most broadcast streams.

That leaves a lot of silent matches, or matches commentated by people with limited knowledge of table tennis. As a sport, we need to bring people in and help educate them about what’s happening in the match – the strategy, the spin, the history – so poor commentary leaves yet another huge missed opportunity.

Will lessons be learnt? I doubt it.

Service Rules Are A Huge Problem

For those unaware, serving in table tennis has a few simple rules:

• Players must throw the ball up vertically at least 16 cm (around 6 inches) without imparting any spin onto the ball.
• The ball must be struck whilst falling down, above and behind the end line of the table.
• At no point can the ball be obscured from the opponent’s eye-line, including by a hand or clothing.
• The ball must hit the servers side of the table before hitting your opponents side anywhere on the table (in singles) or diagonally across (in doubles).

The most obvious issue new players discuss is that professionals rarely throw the ball up ‘vertically’ however in reality this has very little impact on the serve as long as the throw is mostly up rather than across.

The real issue that’s had a spotlight shone on it from this Olympics is the ball being obscured at the point of contact.

This rule is incredibly important because the spin imparted on the ball is only determined by the direction of the racket at the point of contact. To try and deceive opponents, most players from casual to professional will move the racket in multiple directions during the serving motion.

Professionals are very good at this. Most normal people would have an exceptionally hard time just knowing what spin is on the ball, never mind actually returning the serve.

All of this means that it’s incredibly difficult to spot the spin on the ball without also seeing the exact contact point (hence the rule). Yet we saw multiple occasions where players complained about their opponent hiding the contact point behind their hand and/or body.

The most high-profile example of this was Truls Moregardh pointing out Wang Chuqin’s illegal serves in their Round of 32 clash, with the referee choosing to award Truls a yellow card for “time wasting”.

The root cause of the issue is that umpires simply can’t see whether the contact point is visible to the opponent unless it’s an extreme example of an illegal serve. From their vantage points at the side of the table, neither the umpire nor assistant umpire could be confident making that call.

With the decreasing costs of technology in sport, it feels like only a matter of time before a “hawk eye” style system becomes common at professional tournaments to help umpires out. 

Bonus: Wang Chuqin’s Racket Controversy

In a moment of Olympic controversy, Wang Chuqin (the favorite for Men’s Singles Gold) had his racket stepped on and broken by a clumsy photographer just moments after he had won the Mixed Doubles title.

In his next match, he was knocked out of the Men’s Singles by a dominant Truls Moregardh. Unsurprisingly, the internet became awash with conspiracy theories. Was the photographer a Swedish plant? Or just someone who didn’t want China to win Gold?

The reality is the most likely scenario, which is that an unlucky photographer took a poorly-judged step in the scrum to get a medal with the Gold-medal winning doubles pair. Wang will lament placing his racket down in a place where that was even a possibility, something most club members try to avoid.

I’ll give him a pass this time though, he was celebrating winning an Olympic Gold medal after all.

Did it then have an impact on his ability to play against Truls? I think this is a massive stretch and a poor excuse for underperformance.

The top players have multiple identical rackets (and some with slightly different characteristics) and have trained hard using rackets each with miniscule performance variations. Any impact in actual performance is 100% down to a mental lapse instead of an equipment downgrade.

If you want to win a Gold medal, you need to be mentally strong. Wang Chuqin is experienced enough to handle swapping out identical equipment, so maybe it really was just the fact he came up against a better player on the day.

The real blame belongs with his coach, Xiao Zhan, who decided to make a big deal of the broken racket mere seconds after the Gold-medal winning moment. A bit of emotional intelligence would have told him to hide the racket and deal with the problem privately when the atmosphere was less emotionally charged. Perhaps then Wang would have been less psychologically affected by the equipment loss.