The lights went up. The hum of the crowded arena built to a
deafening roar as the contestants marched out under the Olympic rings. Their
names were announced one by one. As they warmed up the excitement was palpable.
These were the best of the best. The honour of many countries – Nigeria, Ukraine,
USA, Columbia, Congo and Canada to name but a few – was at stake and would be
decided over the next three hours. A hush descended as the four simultaneous matches
were about to start. The balls skittered over the surface in flashes of white.
The preliminary round of the women’s singles London 2012 Olympic Table Tennis
had begun!
Yes, I had escaped from Pilsdon for a few days and arrived
in a different London than the one I had left – garish pink signs everywhere
announced the presence of Olympic venues, Olympic rings had been painted onto
lanes along which only those blessed with Olympic VIP status could drive, and
my church’s cafe in Camberwell had five bagels hung in the window in a familiar
pattern (for which they got in trouble with the local council, as reported by
the Daily Mail)
London 2012’s table tennis was held not in the
newly-constructed-at-vast-expense Olympic Park but in a dull but
mind-bogglingly big hangar-like structure in the Docklands called the ExCeL Centre,
large enough to house five separate arenas under one roof. I had been here a couple of times before for
mobile phone software conferences where hundreds of other geeks, or “developers”
as they sometimes prefer to be known, milled around showing off their latest
Bluetooth profiles and wondering when they could start drinking. This time
however I was surrounded by ordinary members of the Great British Public, most
with kids in tow, all who had suddenly to pretend to own a life-long passion
for the art of ping-pong, but who actually had just ticked that box on the spur
of the moment after selecting the must-see events – 100m sprint, floor
gymnastics and women’s beach volleyball – none of which anyone ended up with.
Well, I didn’t anyway.
The first shock was that, contrary to every game of table
tennis I had ever played (and I’ve played for the Derby Hall team of the
University of Nottingham, no less) the official rules have the game finishing
at 11 points, not 21. And only two
serves each, not five. This did have the advantage that you could get a
best-of-seven match over with within 45 minutes, which was when the next set of
competitors were wheeled out. If you got bored with the nearest game you could
switch attention to the one going on next to it. Watching table tennis is like
flicking through a book of short stories compared with the Tolstoy epics of
tennis.
The next surprise was the lack of ball-boys or ball-girls (can
I call them ball-children?) When a return went wrong or a smash went right and
the ball floated off to the far corner, the competitor themselves had to go
fetch. They didn’t even have a spare one in their pocket. I was terrified they
might step on it by accident and bring the whole match to a premature and
inconclusive end. I won’t bore you with a blow-by-blow account of each match
but do spare a thought for Anolyn Lulu of the Pacific island of Vanuatu who
came half-way round the world to play at 9am on Day 1 of the Olympics, only to
be knocked out 4-0 with clinical precision by a Brazilian. Hopefully she got a
chance to look round a bit before her flight home.
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