Brazilian defeats Chinese in table tennis, their own sport
Yao Ming adorned NBA banners for ten years, which fueled basketball’s rise to popularity in China.
Table tennis needs the inverse: an eye-catching outsider to get the emphasis off China. The ideal candidate is Hugo Calderano.
He comes from Brazil, where table tennis is not well-known, has defeated several of China’s top players, knows seven languages, including Chinese, and is an ambassador for the sport.
“It’s still probably one of the biggest issues we have out there we have to tackle,” said Steve Dainton, the CEO of the ITTF, the sport’s world governing body. He described China’s domination of the game as a situation that has “lived with us for quite a while.”
“I kind of feel Hugo is a part of this change, and it’s been very positive — specifically about China,” Dainton added.
With victories over several of the top Chinese players, including No. 1 Fan Zhendong, Calderano is currently ranked No. 5 in the sport; a year earlier, he was No. 3.
“If I’m hitting my shots, I have a great chance of winning, even against the best Chinese,” he told The Associated Press in an interview.
Calderano, who now resides in Germany and has a French coach and support staff, was born and reared in Rio de Janeiro. He can “communicate” in both Mandarin and Italian. He is fluent in German, Portuguese, English, French, and Spanish.
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He was asked about his plans to play in Japan this month while attempting to learn an additional eighth language.
“Not at the moment,” he replied.
“He has a very unusual profile,” Calderano’s coach Jean-Rene Mounie said.
“We joke that Hugo is a bit like a guy from Ethiopia or Congo competing in skiing.”
90% of the Olympic gold medals in table tennis have been won by Chinese athletes, and the sport is their national pleasure. Men have won six of the previous seven Olympic gold medals in singles, and women have won every singles gold since the game was included in the Summer Games in 1988.
Since “Ping-Pong Diplomacy” established ties between the United States and China more than 50 years ago, China and table tennis have become synonymous.
China did not, however, invent it. That was the 19th century in England when wine corks were used as balls in the parlor game known as “whiff whaff,” which was played across dining tables. The “net” was made of books or cigar boxes, and the original rackets or paddles may have been stiff placemats.
Dainton wants China to give up some of its supremacy in the medal department and put more of an emphasis on global cooperation, knowledge exchange, and financial gain.
“They are so technically advanced and most of the world doesn’t have the knowledge,” he said.
“Now it’s time for them to share the knowledge.”
Dainton, an Australian who speaks Chinese, claimed to have discussed Chinese dominance in the sport with Liu Guoliang, the two-time Olympic gold champion and president of the Chinese Table Tennis Association.
“He (Liu) is very keen on developing international stars because, even for China, it’s important the sport stays relevant and strong outside China,” Dainton said.
For ten years, Mounie has been Calderano’s coach, and he characterizes his style as playing “stronger, faster, and closer.”
“It’s my nature as a person and an athlete to be very aggressive all the time. I want to impose my game and dominate my opponent,” Calderano said.
There are two realms of table tennis. There is the game with significant recreational participation and the elite version, which is popular in hotspots across Asia and Europe, features lightning strikes, restless players, and a compact table to increase the speed.
Calderano changes his approach. A very low serve is delivered after a high serve that soars 10 feet (3 meters) in the air. To begin the service, he crouches almost to the edge of the table and, like many other players, rubs the table repeatedly to get rid of fictitious dust. In a corner, the net dries a wet hand.
“Hugo is the strongest player in the world,” French player Simon Gauzy told the sports newspaper L’Equipe.
“He is hyper-aggressive all the time. When it works, it’s unstoppable.”
The range of Calderano’s skills extends beyond languages and table tennis. He has a personal record for solving the Rubik’s cube, taking 5.61 seconds, just two seconds slower than the World Cube Association’s declared world record.
He began attending a neighborhood club thanks to his parents, teachers Marcos Calderano and Elisa Borges. At the age of 14, he traveled from Rio to train near Sao Paulo. At the age of 16, he made the move to France. A few years later, after returning to Brazil to recover from an injury, he made the move to Germany.
“Hugo has the ambition to be on the top of the world, and that means beating the Chinese because they are the best,” Mounie said.
“The emotion he puts in his game is very special, always trying to impose his game.”
The top four players from China, according to Calderano, are a cut above.
“Then they have many other players who are just a level below who are also strong and very dangerous but don’t have the consistency of the top guys,” he said.
The CEO, Dainton stated that he anticipates another Chinese gold-winning performance in the Olympics in Paris in 2024. He can dream, though. Calderano made it to the quarterfinals of the Tokyo Olympics and the last 16 in Rio in 2016.
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