Recently, the latest world rankings of the International Table Tennis Federation have aroused heated discussion, in the absence of important international events in the near future, the list that has not changed for several months has been reshuffled, especially Chen Meng's throne of the world's first place for more than two consecutive years has given way to Sun Yingsha, Xu Xin and other people's rankings have dropped (from 3rd to 9th), and Hayata Hina's ranking has soared (from 16th to 6th) which has attracted the most attention.
So the question arises: why is this happening? What are the latest ranking and point rules for the ITTF? Let's take a closer look.
First of all, one thing that everyone must be aware of is that the world rankings in the past year or so have been abnormal, mainly due to the impact of the epidemic and the sharp decline in the number of international competitions. The most typical example is that the world rankings were frozen from April 2020, and were not restarted until After September, and then changed from monthly to weekly changes.
It is in this situation that there is a clear "polarization" of athletes' points, especially the gap between Olympians and non-Olympians, because the associations will allocate the only international competition opportunities as much as possible to the athletes who have been selected for the Olympic Games, and the Olympic Games themselves have the most points, which is enough to make them leave others by a large margin.
Why has Ma Long and Xu Xin maintained the top three in the world before, but the latest ranking is that the former is still ranked 2nd, and the latter has become 9th? A very important reason is that Xu Xin did not participate in the Olympic singles competition. But in addition, there is another point that has also led to the widening of the gap between him and Malone, that is, the timeliness of the points.
According to the latest rules, the "initial points" accumulated before December 2020 have dropped from 80% of the total points at the beginning to 20% of the current share, and will certainly be slowly emptied in the future - Ma Long also participated in the Olympic singles in July 2021 and won the championship, with new and large number of points injected, while Xu Xin's singles points are "only out and not advancing", which will naturally regress.
In the same way, let's take a look at the situation of Chen Meng, Sun Yingsha and Wang Manyu.
Chen Meng's recent domination of women's table tennis is from 2020 to August 2021, and most of it belongs to the "initial points" part. After August, Chen Meng failed to reach the top and stop at the final four of the Houston World Table Tennis Championships and the WTT World Cup consecutively, which was naturally negatively affected.
Sun Yingsha's words, Chen Meng participated in the competition she participated in, and almost every time can enter the final, at the end of last year also won a championship, although the "maximum" is not as good as the sister, but the "average" is higher, so now ranked 1st; and Wang Manyu because he missed the most important Olympic Games, and the WTT World Cup final lost too early, so he is still in the 4th place.
Another very typical example is the Brazilian star Hugo Calderano, who is currently ranked No. 3 in the world, this old man is not only a "check-in" pacesetter in international competitions, but also has an advantage that others can hardly match, that is, he can basically guarantee that he can win the table tennis championship on this continent 100%, after all, no one in the entire Americas can beat him, so the points are increasing.
As for Japan's Hayata Hina is also "seeing the stitches and needles", in the case of multiple withdrawals from the national table tennis, brushed a lot of points, including the WTT Challenge, the Asian Championships, etc. - her ranking before December 2020 was not high, but in 2021 she accumulated a lot of new points, increasing more, decreasing less, and Chen Meng is just the opposite, so it is understandable to suddenly rise by 10 places.
Through the above analysis, we can see that the world ranking can indeed reflect the level of athletes, but it is obviously not one-to-one with the ranking of competition results, and it is relatively more stable. For example, Sun Yingsha can have good results in every competition, but the Olympic Games and the World Table Tennis Championships have still failed to win the championship in singles, so it still needs to work hard.
How to say it, a good ranking does give athletes an advantage in the international competition draw, but if you want to win the championship, you have to beat all opponents, so you must not pay attention to points, and you don't have to pay too much attention.