Summer in the City of To-morrow

notes on china's capital during the 2008 olympics

Vignettes of the Games, Part 2 of 3

2008.08.23

A 75-percent Chinese field with no Asian countries, plus empty seats in the stands.

Ping pong is nominally an international sport, but its upper echelons are filled overwhelmingly with Chinese nationals and mercenary recruits of Chinese origin. Since there's a fixed amount of space on the Chinese national team, some of the lesser players gain expedited citizenship in other countries in order to compete in the Olympics. As a result, nations as diverse as Holland, Austria, the Domincan Republic, Singapore, the US, and Taiwan are represented by athletes born and trained in mainland China. The women's singles Round of 16 encompassed nine nations, but of the sixteen competitors in the bracket, at least eleven were direct exports from the mainland. The men's Round of 16 showed slightly more diversity, with China-born players composing only about half of the bracket.

Nationality, or more specifically who ought to represent a nation, is a pretty tricky concept and probably should be spared of any snap judgments and coarse generalizing. But there is clearly something fishy going on with the national composition of certain Olympic events, the most egregiously fishy of which is surely table tennis. The IOC's own definition of nationality appears to be something like naturalized citizenship. The open-endedness of this criteria is ostensibly in the spirit of national self-determination, but in an era of medal-count prestige wars and fame- or profit-seeking athletes with loose patriotic sensibilities, it produces such manifest absurdities as corn-fed midwesterners Chris Kaman and Becky Hammon playing for European national basketball squads and the unrestrained stockpiling of Chinese players in the international table tennis arms race.

You'll also note in the above photo the surprising volume of unoccupied seats in the gymnasium stands, which phenomenon has turned out to be something of a recurring theme in Olympics commentary and word-of-mouth chatter. This is partly the result of rampant ticket speculation among less-than-formal middlemen (as explained in the last post), but primarily, I'll venture, a consequence of BOCOG's practice of appropriating a large portion of tickets for the use of sponsors, marketers, contractors, banks, and other such corporate interlopers with some kind of business interest in the Olympics. Acquaintances working in sports marketing regale me with tales of a vast bounty of event passes laying unclaimed upon the desks of this or that media liaison or regional manager; the correspondingly vast number of empty seats at Olympics venues seems to indicate that most of these tickets go to waste, at least in the non-medal events. I'm guessing this sort of thing is par for course in the world of professional sports, and it's easy to imagine a) how the larger scale and higher profile of the Olympics amounts to greater business stakes, and b) how this in turn results in more comprehensive gratuities paid out to corporate partners. None of this is really all that surprising, but it does represent yet another reminder of how the Beijing Games are concretely an elite affair, despite all the efforts to construct a branding narrative of common social progress and ambiguous We Are the World co-prosperity.

Round 3 Women's Singles table tennis

I watched several Round 2 matches in both men's and women's ping-pong singles, which means I saw a sampling of the best 64 players in the world from each sex. Even within this rarefied territory, it's possible to observe huge variances in ability among the athletes. This is most obvious in the men's game, where there seems to be a line within the top 64 between players who can return smashes with consistency and power and those who simply cannot. The alternating of men's and women's matches also made plain the contrast between the men's and women's game. To speak frankly, there's a level of excitement, suspense, and artistry in the men's game that is missing in the slower and less powerful women's game. However, unlike in basketball, where the men's game is a superior spectacle to the women's game in just about every objective measure (e.g., you aren't seeing above-the-rim play or 25-foot three-pointers in women's basketball), ping pong does offer the women's game some advantages as a spectator sport, most notably in the fact that you can have true defensive play and ludicrously long, spin-filled rallies in the women's game—the men's game tends to end its points on smash winners or botched smash returns.

Spectators enthralled with Zhang Yining and Fukuhara Ai

I also got to see a smattering of Round 3 women's singles matches, which featured arguably the world's two most famous table tennis players, world number-one Zhang Yining (张怡宁) of China and Japan's twelfth-ranked Fukuhara Ai (福原愛). Based on the number of photos taken during their matches, warmup routines, and post-match fiddling, I get the feeling that Zhang and Fukuhara were what the crowd really had come to see.

Zhang Yining greets her fans

Zhang Yining is by all indications the single best female ping pong player in the world, having justified her number-one seed by winning the singles gold meal just days after I saw her play in Round 3. From this fact, I can now claim the weird privilege of beholding the physical presence of someone who is the best in the world at what she does. Zhang is apparently a household name in China, and was chosen out of the vast body of Chinese Olympians to read the athlete's oath during the Opening Ceremony. I have no competence to judge her game with any real insight; what I noticed about her was that she had a more full-bodied forehand motion than most players, and that she basically made no mistakes at all.

Fukuhara Ai's media contingent

Pictured above is the paparazzi contingent assigned specifically to document Fukuhara Ai's third-round match against Melek Hu, yet another Chinese-born player representing Turkey. Fukuhara is something of a Beckham or Sharapova figure, an athlete whose not-insignificant talents are nevertheless overshadowed by her good looks and celebrity charm. I first encountered her four years ago during my teaching job in Japan, on a motivational poster stuck to the glass of the faculty locker room. It might have read something like "SPORTS...I JUST LOVE THEM" in Japanese, although I don't remember very clearly. At the time, Fukuhara was just 16 years old and had played to the Round of 16 in the Athens Games. Today, she's a star in China as well as in Japan, a fact partially owed to her Chinese ancestry (her father was himself a product of China's table tennis machine) and her ability to speak dongbeihua, a dialect of Chinese. I was later told that her Chinese was so fluent that she even dropped the equivalent of a few f-bombs on Chinese national TV during a goodwill tour of the earthquake-ravaged areas of Sichuan; apparently casual profanity is very common in dongbeihua, but it's unmistakably faux pas in the context of the rather puritan Chinese mainstream.

Fukuhara's game has two notable components: a preference for extremely quick rallies focused on her backhand, and a signature fist-pump celebration punctuated by a shrill cry of "Saa!". I'm not entirely convinced that this ritual actually originates from Fukuhara herself, but whatever its true genealogy may be, it has become identified with her, and for all intents and purposes, she owns it. Since Fukuhara's appearance in the Athens Games, a whole generation of "Saa!"-uttering young ping pong players has thus been unleashed upon Japan.

Fukuhara might even consider trademarking her iconic celebration, in the manner of Lleyton Hewitt and his weird and kind of Eurotrashy "Vicht" gesture that pops up in men's professional tennis every now and then. We actually saw one of Singapore's Chinese ringers vigorously executing the Saa!-plus-fist-pump after scoring key points in her Round 3 match. She seemed fairly mature, which makes it unlikely that she would be imitating the younger Fukuhara. Thus it might appear plausible that both had picked up the routine long ago while training in China. The hitch in this thinking is that an exclamation such as Saa! is so utterly Japanese in flavor that one ought to be automatically suspicious of any theory proposing a Chinese origin.

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