There is a joke that table tennis has difficulty levels just like a video game: Easy, normal, hard — and China.
For decades, China’s supremacy in the paddle-and-ball game, also known as ping pong, has gone unquestioned. For just as long, Japan — often seen as its greatest threat — has been striving to upend the status quo.
Last month, two-time Olympian Tomokazu Harimoto stunned China’s reigning world champion, Wang Chuqin, 4-2 in the men’s singles final to win the WTT Champions Yokohama title. Harimoto made it clear that he sees the victory as being a watershed, saying it was like “opening a hole in a large wall.”
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