The last ball lands, and everyone stands

July 31, 2024, Paris — South Paris Arena, Table 4 hall.

The score was 0:4. The loser was 61-year-old Ni Xialian; the winner, 23-year-old Sun Yingsha.

But after that final ball hit the floor, the entire crowd rose to applaud the player who had lost. Her husband walked to the barrier, took her hand, and kissed it gently. “He always sneaks a kiss when I’m not ready,” Ni said, a little shyly.

It was her sixth Olympic Games.

From Shanghai to Luxembourg, forty years

Ni Xialian was born in Shanghai on July 4, 1963. At nine, she watched a table tennis match on TV, decided it looked fun, and joined the school team.

At the 1983 World Championships in Tokyo, 20-year-old Ni partnered Guo Yuehua to the mixed doubles title and won the women’s team gold with China. One of the sweetest moments of her life.

But there was a gap in her record too. She retired in 1986 — and two years later, table tennis only just became an official Olympic sport in Seoul. She missed the Olympics entirely.

Her road afterwards ran a long way. She studied at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, then moved to Germany to play, and became a Luxembourg citizen in 1991. Her penhold long-pips game was poison for European players: in 1996 she won the Europe Top 12 — the first major international title in Luxembourg’s table tennis history — and then took that event three years running; at the European Championships in 1998 and 2002 she collected three more titles. The Luxembourg press called her “the invincible table tennis queen of Europe.”

Starting with Sydney in 2000, she simply played the Games, one Olympiad after another.

At 61, she won a match that entered Olympic history

At Paris 2024, Ni Xialian represented Luxembourg for the sixth time, the oldest table tennis player in Olympic history. She was also the flag bearer for Luxembourg at the opening ceremony.

In the first round of women’s singles she met 31-year-old Sibel Altinkaya of Turkey and won 4:2. That victory made her the oldest winner of a match in Olympic table tennis history. She jumped high in the air and waved to the crowd with a grin.

In round two, she drew the world No. 1, Sun Yingsha.

Before the match she was relaxed: “I’ve done my job! I’m happy to play Sun Yingsha next — it’s a rare chance to learn from her. I’ll try to win as many points as I can.”

She managed more than a point. In game three she clawed back to 11:11 before losing 11:13. Every time she hit a good ball she’d spin on her toes in a little twirl; every time Sun did, Ni would nod and smile. On one ball she even saved it with a full 360-degree turn, drawing a roar from the crowd.

After the 0:4, she joked that her style had aged out: “A lot of my balls would score against anyone else. Against Shasha they’re just tickles — light rain.”

Then she did something “foolish”

Before the mixed doubles final in Paris, the Chinese team came to Ni Xialian.

North Korea’s Kim Kum-yong played long pips, the same technical family as Ni. To help Sun Yingsha and Wang Chuqin prepare, China asked Ni to act as a training partner.

That meant deliberately showing her own game to the very player she would face next — her second-round opponent was Sun Yingsha herself.

She said yes, and happily. On social media she wrote: “It’s an honor to be a practice partner for ‘Sha-Tou’. To have the chance to give something back to my motherland, to the Chinese team — to sweep away even a small obstacle on their road to the title — that makes me genuinely happy.”

“Without my country, without the Chinese team’s training, what would I even be?” That was her most heartfelt line in Paris.

You know how it ended: Sun Yingsha and Wang Chuqin took mixed doubles gold; Ni Xialian lost her second-round match to Sun. She lost happily.

She also reunited in Paris with 58-year-old Chilean player Zeng Zhiying — the two had last shared a venue forty years earlier.

A closing thought

Sun Yingsha said: “Auntie Ni’s sportsmanship is something I should learn from. Look — no matter how far behind she is, she keeps fighting out there, keeps looking for solutions.”

Ni Xialian says she doesn’t dare think about whether Paris was her last Games. “I’ll just work toward the next one.”

We’re used to measuring athletes by championships. Ni Xialian’s sixth Olympics reminds us that in competitive sport there is something rarer: after forty-plus years, still willing to prepare seriously for a match you’re bound to lose, play it seriously, and lose it seriously.

That kind of love is harder to replicate than a gold medal.

Her opponent in Paris: Sun Yingsha. She retired in 1986, just as table tennis was about to join the Olympics for the first time — 38 years of Olympic table tennis.