China to train foreign ping pong players

Beijing, Dec 27 (ANI): China, which has been accused of being dominant in Table Tennis and making international matches look one-sided, would reportedly train ping-pong technique to foreign players to make matches look more competitive.

According to The Telegraph, foreign players would be able to enrol themselves for four-year courses at a new Chinese Academy of Table Tennis in Shanghai starting from next year.

The paper quoted Yang Peifang, the Vice party Secretary of the new academy, as saying that since China was at the top of the ping pong pyramid, it had to take foreign "lambs" and "breed them into wolves" to encourage competition.

Yang, who claims that the secret of China's success over the years has been a mastery of both technique and ping pong strategy, said: "If the foreign student is already quite good at the table, we will teach him ping pong theory. If not, we can improve his skills at the table too."

Eventually, Chinese officials said, the 300 students at the academy would be split half-and-half between Chinese and foreigners.

China's clean sweep at the Olympics saw it take gold, silver and bronze medals in both the men's and women's competitions and gold in both team events. It was the first time a country has won every available medal at the games. At the time, the Chinese public joked that ping-pong was "the game with the most certain result".

The Shanghai government would initially start training schools with a cost of 13 million pound, and eventually hopes to establish branches overseas to train more players. (ANI)