He has defeated several generations of world champion players in national table tennis, including Kong Linghui, Wang Liqin, Ma Lin, Wang Hao, Zhang Jike, Ma Long, Xu Xin, and he has also won 2 world championships, even Liu Guoliang has to sigh: I can't sleep well with him; with him, any accident can happen at any time!
He is 40 years old this year, but he can still enter the Olympic arena for the sixth time and finally win a silver medal. Looking to the future, this person is even more blunt: "Paris (The Olympic Games) is a bit far away, and all this is not over!" ”
This is a respectable opponent.
His name was Timo Boll.
Most chinese table tennis fans first learned about Bol, it should be in 2002 - that year the men's World Cup was the home of national table tennis, everyone hoped to see their athletes climb to the top and win gold, laughing at the field, and as a result, a 21-year-old boy turned out to be a champion and defeated Wang Liqin, Kong Linghui and others to become champions.
That's right, that person is Pol.
2002 was a bumper year for Bol's career, when he won the World Cup, European Championship, and European Championship singles titles in one go, and soon ranked first in the world, which attracted the great attention of national table tennis. Everyone thinks that a strong opponent like Waldner is about to reappear, at least for twenty years against the national table tennis!
Unfortunately, this prophecy is only half right.
From 2002 until 2021, Pol did play with the national table tennis for twenty years. But when it comes to threats, he and Waldner are not comparable.
It is true that Pol has won three generations of core national table tennis players from Kong Linghui to Ma Long, and has won the World Cup gold medal twice, and twice "destroyed" the Chinese players (2005 World Cup consecutive wins Wang Liqin, Ma Lin, Wang Hao, 2017 World Cup defeat lin Gaoyuan, Ma Long). But the higher the level of competition, the more ugly Pol's results are, and there is no "worthy" of Liu Guoliang's attention.
From 2000 to 2021, Pol participated in the Olympic Games 6 times, only the team performance was OK, the singles lost miserably, the best result was only to reach the quarterfinals, never reached the semi-finals; the World Table Tennis Championships Bol could only achieve mutual achievements with the powerful German team, and if he went alone, he could not do it, and so far he has only won a bronze medal.
Compared with the first table tennis Grand Slam winner in history, Lao Wa, Pol is indeed much inferior, which is also a topic he is often criticized for: after all, there are not many world champions who can lose to African athletes at the Olympic Games, and Pol lost to Nigeria's Aruna in 2016.
After eliminating Lin Gaoyuan and Ma Long in the 2017 World Cup, Ball's threat to national table tennis has gradually declined. At the 2019 Austrian Open, Ball was overturned by Fan Zhendong, the leader of the new generation of national table tennis, with a 3-1 lead in the big score and 10-8 lead in the decider, and had no chance to break through the main defense line of the Chinese team again.
After this battle, Pol finally suffered a serious injury, and lived for more than a year before returning to the international arena, only to lose to South Korea's Jeong Young-sik in the singles competition at the Tokyo Olympics, and lost to Ma Long in the team competition and the national table tennis battle, and finally ended the battle with a silver medal.
But even if Ball loses, so what? Fans and friends did not talk about heroes as success or failure, but also sent blessings to the 40-year-old veteran. Most of Bol's contemporaries have bid farewell to the field, and it is not easy for him to persist to this day, what else can we ask for?
This time, Pol said goodbye to the Tokyo arena in applause; next time, we look forward to his paris challenge in applause: old rivals, old friends, we will meet again in 3 years!