The ITTF world rankings for the 2nd week of the new year were released on 7th January, and the three Olympic champions Ma Long, Fan Zhendong and Chen Meng, who applied for withdrawal last year, naturally continue to remain unnamed on the list, while another world champion has disappeared from the list in this period, that is, Chinese table tennis team mainstay and 43-year-old Chinese Taipei veteran Chuang Chih-Yuan (2013 World Series men’s doubles gold medallist, partnered by Chen Chien-An), who has beaten the Chinese table tennis team several times.
After the Paris Olympics, Chuang Chih-Yuan only participated in one international tournament and has been flying high ever since, and although he was ranked in the top 50 men’s singles (44th) last week, he has now decided to leave the game for good, and fans have been sending him their best wishes.
Born in 1981, Zhuang Zhiyuan was once known as one of the three hopefuls of the world’s men’s ping pong at the beginning of the 21st century, along with Wang Hao and Timo Boll. Eventually, all three became world champions, but Zhuang Zhiyuan’s development has been relatively more bumpy.
Although the debut of the Chinese table tennis team on many occasions to beat the main force, and even a single game to send Ma Lin ‘zero eggs’, but by the ITTF big ball reform, Zhuang Zhiyuan this kind of smaller power athletes or suffered a greater impact, the youth performance has been on and off, until the age of 32 years old to take advantage of the contraction of the Chinese table tennis team men’s doubles strategy to win the World Championships in this project, is very dramatic indeed. It was indeed very dramatic to win the World Championships.
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At the beginning of the Paris Olympic cycle, Zhuang Zhiyuan still has a very strong impact, beat the Chinese table tennis team world champion main force Liang Jingkun, Japan’s first brother Harimoto Tomokazu and so on, but after all, at that time he was already over 40 years old, with the passage of time the state of the natural decline, coupled with the Chinese Taipei junior Gao Chengrui feathered, so Zhuang Zhiyuan can finally seriously consider the matter of retirement.
After the Los Angeles Olympic cycle, Zhuang Zhiyuan participated in the WTT Macau Championships and lost to Chinese table tennis team Xu Yingbin, and since then he has never been able to appear in the international arena, and three months later, he even withdrew from the world rankings like Ma Long, Fan Zhendong and Chen Meng.
According to media reports from Chinese Taipei, Zhuang Zhiyuan submitted his application to withdraw from the world rankings last week, and the secretary general of the local association, Ye Guoqin, said bluntly in an interview that ‘we had double and triple confirmation at that time before we sent out the (application) letter’, apparently still hoping that the veteran would give serious consideration to the application, but Zhuang Zhiyuan ultimately did not come back to his senses.
As the WTT will be strictly enforcing the withdrawal fine rule in the new year, many athletes have protested, especially the older players will suffer, which may also be a major reason why Zhuang Zhiyuan took the initiative to apply for a withdrawal from the world rankings.
So do you remember the highlights of Chuang’s career? Feel free to leave a comment and write your own memories!
