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Queen of Ping Pong in Olympic Bid
Queen of ping pong Wang Nan, who spearheads China's women's team in their national sport of table tennis, is set to be a hero in her home country should she win both singles and doubles in Sydney.
Seeded at number one in both events, in partnership with Li Ju in the doubles, the pony-tailed left hander has the weight of national expectations on her shoulders.
She is a stable, level-headed competitor, an unassuming, no frills champion whose faultless all-round game humbly destroys all opposition.
Wang is the undisputed best player in the world winning both the world singles and doubles titles at the 1999 championships in Eindhoven, Holland.
She then earned the world team title in Malaysia in February earlier this year with two singles victories in the final against Chinese Taipei.
Deng Yaping won both singles and doubles at the Atlanta and Barcelona Olympics to become enshrined in legend but since her retirement, Wang has taken over as China's, hence the world's, table tennis queen.
The 21-year-old from Liao Ning province has been playing since the age of seven, honing her technique at the national training centre in Beijing. The years of work mean technically she is almost perfect and her domination makes her the sport's equivalent to Tiger Woods.
China dominates the women's game to such an extent that Wang's major Olympic rivals, the seeds from two to eight, are all China-born except for South Korea's fifth seed Ryu Ji Hye.
Eighth seed Tian-Zorner Jing and sixth seed Gotsch Qianhong now play for Germany, however and seventh seed Chire Koyama plays for Japan.
Chinese Taipei's third seed Chen Jing even won Olympic gold for China in the women's singles in Seoul in 1988.
Chen is one of Wang's major rivals for gold as it is well known the Chinese, when playing each other, often decide the result before the match has started.
Wang did beat Chen on the way to the Brazilian Open women's singles title in mid-July but it was a hard, five-set battle, much tougher than the 21-7, 21-11 scoreline Wang beat Chen in the world team championship in Malaysia.
A month before the Rio event, Wang won the prestigious Japan Open title, beating Olympic second seed Li Ju in the final over five sets. Li had earlier beaten Chen in the semi-final.
China have won every Olympic women's singles title since the first in 1988 and have only lost one doubles title, when South Korea's Hyun Jung-Hwa and Yang Young-Ja claimed gold in 1988.
Hence few would be betting that China, and Wang particularly, would fail to carry off both women's golds in this first Olympics of the new millennium.
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