On April 30, Beijing time, the International Table Tennis Federation officially announced an important decision to the outside world, that is, to reform the world ranking rules again and completely delete the "initial points" launched in 2020. Although this move provides many new athletes with more opportunities to rise in the rankings, it is very unfriendly to veterans who have not participated for a long time, Xu Xin and Liu Shiwen's rankings may continue to decline, and Zhu Yuling will be a big backwards, and even the risk of points being emptied!
As we all know, with the outbreak of the new crown epidemic in 2020, many events in the world table tennis world have been postponed or cancelled, and even the Tokyo Olympic Games and the Busan World Table Tennis Championships have not been spared. Although the competition was restarted, the frequency of holdings was very low, especially the number of places in many competitions was limited, which also made the world rankings possiblely seriously unbalanced, so the ITTF specially introduced a policy to introduce "initial points" to ensure that everyone's ranking is relatively reasonable.
The so-called "initial points", that is, adding a fixed value to each athlete's points, is initially selected to select 80% of the total points in December 2020, and then gradually decreases. Under such circumstances, some players who failed to get the opportunity to compete in the competition can have enough buffer room to wait for new competitions to supplement points, especially the national table tennis masters who did not qualify for the Olympic Games and the World Table Tennis Championships have gained a chance to breathe.
But with the gradual restart of international competitions, the meaning of "initial points" will naturally be gradually diluted, from 80% to 20% now, because of this, Xu Xin's singles ranking has dropped to the men's 9th, while Liu Shiwen has dropped to the women's 17th, the reason is that they did not participate in the Olympic singles before, and also gave up the opportunity to compete in the World Table Tennis Championships, so most of the points are from before December 2020, and the points obtained in the recent competition are far from enough.
Once the "initial points" are completely cancelled, then Xu Xin and Liu Shiwen's ranking will inevitably continue to decline, as for another national table tennis world champion Zhu Yuling's situation is even worse, because of the previous illness and hospitalization and other reasons, her recent participation in the number of times is less than Xu Xin, Liu Shiwen, and there is no intention of coming back, and if she continues like this, she may completely lose the world ranking, which is really worrying!
Of course, for young players, the significance of the initial points is not great, so the new Olympic main players Fan Zhendong, Chen Meng, Sun Yingsha and Wang Manyu can completely maintain the world's top three rankings; veteran Ma Long is still relatively guaranteed because he participated in the Tokyo Olympic Singles and won the runner-up of the WTT Grand Slam. As for how the latest ranking will be, we don't know, or wait for the new list to be released next Tuesday (May 3)!