The New Legend of a Ping-pong Player

By Xu Huadang

Ni Xialian and her husband Tommy visited China in May, 2009 after the Luxemburg table-tennis players under the couples leadership competed in world championships in Japan. In a stadium named after her in a middle school in Jiangyin, a city in Jiangsu Province, Ni demonstrated her ping-pong skills and talked about her Chinese roots and her passion for pingpong.

The former world champion has her ancestral roots in Shengzhou City in eastern Zhejiang Province. Her parents came from farmers families. In 1953, they got married and moved to Shanghai. Ni Xialian was born in July 1963 in Shanghai. She was the youngest of the four children. As her parents worked in factories, she was sent back to her fathers home village where her grandparents took care of the baby with the help of a wet nurse. After she was weaned, she came back to Shanghai.

She began to play pingpong at 7 when she was a second grader of a primary school. Shortly after she became all-Shanghai junior champion, she became the national junior champion. Then she joined the national team.

Ni Xialian helped China win the womens team event in the 1983 World Championships in Nagoya, Japan. She also won the mixed doubles with her partner Guo Yuehua in the same championships. It was a great moment of her pingpong career.

Ni Xialian retired from the national team in February, 1986, when she was 23 years old. In 1989, recommended by a coach with the national team, Ni signed a contract with a pingpong club under Bayer, a German industrial giant. She was not the first Chinese pingpong master who played for a European club. From the 1970s onward, Chinese champions were invited to coach foreign players. Ni and her husband Lin Hongwei moved to Krefeld on the River Rhine. She played for the club for a year and won all the games. Seeing her magic tactics and all-win record, European clubs vied each other to give her a better offer. She chose to play for the Luxemburg team, for the offer from Luxemburg was irresistible: she was offered a good salary and her husband was offered a very good job. So the couple came to Luxemburg. In the following years, Ni played for clubs in Germany, USA, Poland, Luxemburg, Italy and the Netherlands and she helped all her clubs win national championships. In 1996, 97 and 98, she was the champion of the top 12 European players. In 1998, she became the European champion.

Her European championship in 2002 was hard won. That year, her marriage with Lin Hongwei fell apart. For three months, she was unable to eat well and sleep well. She decided not to compete in the upcoming European competition and planned to take her son to travel abroad. The coach of the national team successfully talked her out of her sadness. That year, the 39-year-old Ni won not only the gold medal of womens singles but also the gold medal of womens doubles at the European championships. The championships she won made her a national hero in Luxemburg.

Her next big dream was to compete in the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games. In order to qualify, she began to compete again in 2007. In March 2008, she was officially notified of her qualification by the International Table Tennis Association. At learning the good news, she wept ecstatically. She began to prepare for her first Olympic appearance.

On August 20, 2008, the 45-year-old Ni played at her Olympic game against Huang Yihua, a player from Taiwan. The oldest woman player in the Olympic pingpong competition won the game. Her Olympic triumph was not only great news in China but also widely reported in the world media. She was quite philosophical about her loss in the second round.

Her Life Now

Ni Xialians husband Tommy is a Sweden with Germanic ancestral roots. He used to be a top-grade pingpong player in Swede, but became a coach of Australian national team at the age of 21. Since 1994 he has been working as the head coach of the Luxemburg national team. Ni and Tommy got married in 2002. They now have a six-year-old daughter.

Tommy comments, “Ni is a miracle. The world probably would not have another woman of her age with so many championships under her name.” Now the family lives in a 700-m2 luxurious villa in Ettelbruck, the second largest city in Luxemburg. Such a house is a luxury in Luxembourg where land is in extremely short supply. She was rewarded the land because of her unique contribution to the nation.

The people in Luxemburg are not the only ones who take pride in Ni.

Shengzhou people also think Ni Xialian is their pride and their legend. After all, she is the only woman in the world who won a world championship at 20 and played well in the top form in the next 25 years across the world. □