Following their doubles wins Monday evening, the Chinese female
paddlers kept their winning streak Tuesday in the singles
competition of the table tennis tournament at the 2004 Athens
Olympiad, with all three players entering the last 16.
However, Sydney Olympic double champion Wang Nan and world cup
singles winner Niu Jianfeng, ranked 2nd and 3rd in the world
respectively, were given some real big scares by their
much-lower-ranked rivals from the DPR Korea and Germany.
The highly-seeded Niu, who played her first singles match
Tuesday evening though the competition had entered its third
round,was unexpectedly pushed to the edge of precipice by
46th-ranked Elke Wosik as she lost the first two games by the same
score of 12-14 and trailed 1-3 behind the German in the first four
games.
Fortunately, the German seemed to have lost her control of the
match all of a sudden, and allowed Niu to stage a miraculous
comeback and win 4-3.
"It was a very difficult match for me. It's all blank in my head
and please don't ask me anything," said a pale-faced Niu after the
match.
"Niu has played too soft in the opening games and that gave
theGerman a great chance," commented Lu Yuansheng, coach of the
Chinese women 's team.
Wosik, who wept after the match probably for having missed a
great opportunity to produce the biggest upset so far in the
tournament, said that she lost the last three games because her
physical strength could no longer afford such an intense match.
"But I think I have proved that I can play equal with the
world's top paddlers," she said.
In her encounter with 51st-ranked Kim Yun Mi of the DPR Korea,
Wang Nan found it hard to get into her best form quickly and also
seemed to be troubled by her opponent's perfect defense and
powerful counterattacks. It was not until the fourth game, when she
was already 1-2 down, that Wang came to her real self and took the
next three games in a row to win 4-2.
Wang's career reached its lowest ebb in 2002 after she lost two
crucial matches to the DPR Koreans in the team final at the Busan
Asiad. However, she managed to restore her past glory by taking
three titles in women's singles, women's doubles and mixed
doublesat the Paris world championships the next year.
In another third round match played on Tuesday morning,
China'sworld No.1 Zhang Yining, who had been drawn to the different
half,crushed New Zealand veteran player Li Chunli 4-0 with little
difficulty.
"I played much better today than in yesterday's doubles match. I
had been nervous in my first match in the tournament, but today I
feel much more relaxed," said Zhang.
The 42-year-old Li, the eldest female player in the Olympic
tournament who had played for China in the prime time of her
career, attracted much media attention after she claimed Monday
that she would turn out to be the winner in the match with
Zhang.
After Tuesday's matches, Asian players have assumed an
overwhelming dominance in the last 16 of women's singles, with
three seats each for China and Japan, two each for Chinese Hong
Kong, Singapore and the DPR Korea, and one for South Korea.
The Europeans only have three representatives in the next
round,namely Viktoria Pavlovich of Belarussia, Tamara Boros of
Croatia and Adriana Zamfir of Romania.
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(Xinhua News? Agency? August 18, 2004)