The most moving thing in sport is never the blowout

Dominant wins get applause. What gets carved into collective memory are the nights when a player was driven to the cliff’s edge and still chewed the score back, one point at a time. The three matches below span more than twenty years, changed the fortunes of Chinese table tennis, and defined what “never giving up” actually looks like.

1. 2001 · Osaka Worlds, men’s team semifinal: Liu Guozheng saves match point, again and again

China met South Korea in the semifinal, and the tie came down to the final match. A young Liu Guozheng faced the Korean great Kim Taek-soo and was pushed to the brink — match point against him, the whole hall convinced it was over.

He refused to accept it. One match point saved, then another, playing every point as if it were the last of his life, until the comeback was complete. After that night, “marry a man like Liu Guozheng” entered the shared vocabulary of a generation of Chinese fans.

2. 2007 · Zagreb Worlds, men’s singles final: Wang Liqin’s patience

In the final, Wang Liqin faced his familiar teammate Ma Lin and fell well behind — the championship looked like it was sliding into the other man’s hands.

He didn’t gamble everything on desperation shots. Instead he dragged the tempo: solid mid-distance rallies applying pressure point by point, taking game after game until the match had turned. Fans still rate this final among the ceiling performances of that era’s men’s singles.

3. 2024 · Paris Olympics, men’s singles: Fan Zhendong’s coronation

In the quarterfinal, Fan Zhendong ran into Tomokazu Harimoto. Behind early, pushed to the edge of elimination again and again — one more mistake and his entire Olympics would have ended on the spot.

What he did was adjust placement and spin to break up Harimoto’s fast-attack rhythm, held his nerve through the deciding game, then went all the way to the men’s singles gold — and with it, a career Grand Slam.

Comebacks are never luck

Three matches, twenty-plus years, different protagonists, different styles — and yet the common threads are strikingly consistent:

  • Solid fundamentals — when the wind is against you, what holds the floor is always the boring, repetitive work;
  • Control of tempo — no panic when behind; use placement and spin to pull the match back onto your own rails;
  • Nerve on the big points — beyond technique, whoever’s hand doesn’t shake when trailing on the scoreboard is the more likely winner.

Luck might swing a point or two. Everything else was built in training.

A closing thought

This is what makes table tennis addictive: until the scoreboard stops, nobody is entitled to declare victory. For recreational players, this might be the single best sentence to carry to your own table: don’t quit after losing the first game. The match often only truly begins at the moment you decide to hold the score.

By the way: the 2001 Osaka match was still played under the 21-point system; by the 2007 Zagreb final it was 11 points — when did the rules change.