History of the world championships (part 1)

My earliest memory is rather one of a fair than of a table tennis World Championships. Stalls with all kinds of toys, a moon walk and race tracks surrounded the centre court. We played on a concrete floor which hurt your legs, and here and there were blocks of seats in which the interested locals from Birmingham could sit.

They came in particular for the Hungarian table tennis genius, Tibor Klampar. He was often to be found at the edge of the court playing with radiographically controlled cars. The brmmm brmmm noises he made while playing with the cars typefied Klampar's genius. But the fact that cars and inflated jumping pads were among the side events gave the impression of a children's playground rather than a fair.

My first contacts with China were realised during those 1977 World Championships.  The ping pong diplomacy that Nixon and Mao had achieved was less than ten years in existence  and in Birmingham, too, 'Friendship First'was the Chinese adage.

The Chinese table tennis delegation in Birmingham called itself the Mao brigade, and was exceptionally rigidly orthodox. The attire was uniform and old-fashioned. The players wore dark-red tracksuits, the jacket of which only had a zip at the top.

Below the zip was the red-and-yellow symbol of the People's Republic of China. Coaches wore cotton mules and wore their suit jackets over their tracksuits. The charming Li Fu Rong - twice runner-up in the World Championships and at the time Minister of Sport and married to China's prima ballerina - made an indelible impression on me.

Gesturing with hands and feet, sometimes with the help of an interpreter but in particular through my good contact with the most famous Chinese person there, I succeeded in playing with all the Chinese women players. This was essential, even then. They had command of all playing styles and, if you had never encountered one, an unfavourable draw could bundle you out in the first round. As far as that is concerned, little has changed in over thirty years.

I became to a certain extent a member of the Chinese team: we ate, practised and sat in the stands together. It was an excellent performance that I survived the qualifying at such a young age; but I didn't see it like that. I was in Birmingham to prepare for an international career. Without that idea I would have had an inferiority complex among the 177 participating countries.

My favourite player of the 1977 World Championships was not a Chinese. The left-handed, frail Korean Pak Yun Sun was my idol. I could enjoy her aristocratic play and heavenly aura for hours. Play that was both fanatical yet also a feast for the eyes, a splendid body and an untouchable beauty.

Ten years later she was dead. It was a shock to me. She died of cancer of the liver, they told me in Asia. She'd apparently taken overdoses of amphetamines. All I knew was that, in the early 1980s, East German athletes contracted cancer of the liver through taking anabolic  steroids.
 
Pak Yun Sun won the world title in Birmingham as a gift, one of the many incidents in table tennis that are forgotten or not talked about. Throughout the World Championships and in the final, the Chinese Chang Li was superior - but there were greater interests at stake. There had been overtures and negotiations between China, Korea and Japan, and China wanted to make a gesture to 'seal' the friendship.

Chang Li was instructed to lose. The rumour was rife, but the fact was confirmed when, during the final, Chang Li kept serving in the net. In the men's event something similar occurred. The Japanese player Kono was permitted to win by Guo Yaohua. And in the womens'doubles, the Korean/Chinese combination Pak Yong Ok/Yang Ying were given priority over the pure Chinese pairs.

It was to be the last example of the sometimes incomprehensible 'Chinese ideology' having a direct influence on the results. Soon afterwards, China, after the end of the horrible cultural revolution, would exchange (sporting) political manipulation for the power of the dollar.

When the Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping introduced  open-door politics, money became the new ideology. Ping pong became ping ring-a-ding.

A new era had dawned.

This is the first of a trilogy of columns on the history of the World Championships. The next column will be about the World Championships in North Korea.


Bettine Vriesekoop