In a sentence

The length of her career and the weight of her trophy list make up the spine of Chinese women’s table tennis from the late 1990s into the new century.

Playing style

  • Left-handed shakehand, opening up the forehand side with awkward placement
  • Smooth two-winged inverted-rubber loops, highly consistent in rallies
  • Commanding control of match rhythm, good at building an advantage through long exchanges

Career and key moments

She won three straight World Championships women’s singles titles, in Eindhoven in 1999, Osaka in 2001 and Paris in 2003. At the 2000 Sydney Olympics she swept both women’s singles and women’s doubles gold; she won women’s doubles again at the 2004 Athens Olympics; and in 2008 in Beijing she helped the team to the women’s team title and took women’s singles silver. She won 24 world titles over her career, for a long time the most of any Chinese athlete.

What she left the game

Her significance is consistency: in a sport that turns over fast, she held her top level for a full decade.

In a sentence: Long-term steadiness is itself a talent that is very hard to copy.