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Text | Xue Zhengzheng AA
Edit | Xue Zhengzheng AA
At the 1998 Osaka Table Tennis Championships in Japan, Ma Lin, a male table tennis player who was highly anticipated by the Chinese people at that time, finally lost to a Japanese player, and in addition to being shocked, a considerable number of people felt very angry.
The reason for their anger is actually not difficult to understand, because the Japanese player who defeated Ma Lin was Wei Qingguang, a Chinese athlete who changed his nationality and joined the Japanese team.
Today, let's take stock of those athletes who have become foreign nationalities.
Wei Qingguang
As the first gold medalist in men's doubles in China's table tennis, Wei Qingguang entered the training of the Guangxi sports team at the age of 11, but was later misdiagnosed with hepatitis due to excessive training, and was then removed from the team.
But his father went directly to the coach and said, "Although I practice to death, I am responsible for training to death", so that Wei Qingguang returned to the training team.
Eight years later, the 23-year-old Wei Qingguang finally entered the national team because he was the oldest member of the team, and his teammates jokingly called him "Weber".
In 1987, Wei Qingguang and his new partner Chen Longcan participated in the Table Tennis World Championships in New Delhi, India, and he used his original "left hand straight shot anti-rubber arc circle" technique, coupled with Chen Longcan's tacit cooperation, finally defeated the strong Yugoslav combination, and won the first gold medal for the Chinese table tennis team.
This is of great significance to Wei Qingguang's table tennis career.
But just four years after standing at the peak of his life, the 31-year-old Wei Qingguang announced his retirement on the grounds that he wanted to give the rising rookie a chance.
After retiring, Wei Qingguang was sent to Japan by the General Administration of Sports for Sino-Japanese table tennis cultural exchanges, originally he just wanted to continue to hone his skills in Japan and participate in some competitions by the way.
But the athletes who compete in Japan must represent the country of Japan, so naturally they must also be Japanese nationality, so Wei Qingguang has also been refused to participate because of his nationality.
Later, in order to participate in the competition smoothly, Wei Qingguang became a Japanese citizen in 1997 and changed his name to "Wei Guan Qingguang".
In 1998, Wei Guan Qingguang represented Japan in the Asian Championships, and Lectique won the runner-up only to Wang Liqin, and in the same year, at the Asian Games in Bangkok, he led the Japanese men's team to the third place in the men's team.
At the 2000 Sydney Olympics, the elderly Wei Guan Qingguang could no longer compete with the growing Chinese team, and after missing a medal, he announced his retirement and became the coach of the Japanese national team.
After retiring, Wei Seki Harumitsu served as the coach of the men's table tennis team at Yamada High School in Japan, and trained many Japanese national players.
One of the most notable is Ito, who won Japan's first mixed doubles gold medal in table tennis by beating China's Xu Xin/Liu Shiwen pair by Hayabusa Mizutani at the Tokyo 2022 Olympics.
After the game, the Japanese media praised Wei Guan Qingguang as the "godfather of Japanese table tennis", and Wei Guan Qingguang himself said that table tennis needs confrontation to promote the development of this project.
In 2007, the 45-year-old Wei Guan Qingguang officially announced his retirement, and he and his wife settled in Japan, opening a number of table tennis clubs and sports stores.
In recent years, he has also returned to his hometown in Guangxi from time to time, opened a large comprehensive sports goods mall in Nanning, and now Wei Guan Qingguang often runs at both ends and strives to run his own business.
Li Shixin
Li Shixin was also a talented diver in China, and entered the Chinese national diving team at the age of 18 and began his career.
He is not tall, but his bouncing power is amazing, his technique is delicate and stable, and Li Shixin has frequently won championships in many important competitions at home and abroad, and is known as the "king of stability" by experts and spectators.
At the 2009 World Championships, Li Shixin overcame the crowd in the 1-meter springboard event, adding another gold to the Chinese team, and soon the 2012 London Olympics, everyone thought that Li Shixin's 1-meter springboard gold medal was within reach.
However, by fate, Li Shixin accidentally missed in the Olympic trials, and the national team finally chose another young player.
The quadrennial Olympics did not wait for anyone, and Li Shixin, who was 24 years old at the time, felt that time was not waiting.
What made him more anxious was that the Chinese team was strong, and every Olympic diving event had to compete fiercely, and later Li Shixin had a whim, it was better to shift his goal to a relatively weak foreign country, with his excellent performance at home, it should be promising to develop abroad.
So, he had a bold idea - to join the Australian nationality and represent Australia, and at first Li Shixin was still worried about this idea, giving up his Chinese nationality, and he could not open his mouth to discuss with anyone.
Finally, one day, Li Shixin plucked up the courage to confide in his wife.
He was worried that his wife would strongly oppose this decision, but unexpectedly, his wife understood and supported his idea very well, which gave Li Shixin great encouragement.
After becoming an Australian citizen, the 33-year-old Li Shixin entered the Australian delegation to participate in the 2021 Tokyo Olympics, and then won the runner-up in the 2023 World Cup in Montreal.
On the podium, as the Chinese athletes who won the championship received the medals, and the Chinese national anthem was also played in the venue, Li Shixin, who had already joined the Australian nationality at that time, couldn't help himself for a while, and actually sang along, singing, and shed tears.
Asked afterwards, Li Shixin confessed that he did not regret his original choice for a chance to realize his dream, but at the same time, he was also sincerely proud of his Chinese ancestry.
He Zhili
He Zhili is also a highly talented Chinese table tennis player, but due to a serious disagreement with the coaching staff due to a game, the trajectory of his life has changed drastically.
In 1987, at the World Table Tennis Championships held in New Delhi, India, the Chinese coaching staff made the decision to let He Zhili "concede the ball" in order to win the championship.
Although Ho Zhili told the coaching staff that she would cooperate, in the match with her teammate Guan Jianhua, in order to qualify, she suddenly tried to win all three sets.
This angered the coaching staff and teammates who believed she had sabotaged her plans to win the championship, and although she finally won the championship against South Korea's Yang Young-ja in the final, she was banned for two years after returning home and failed to compete in the 1988 Seoul Olympics.
After the ban expired, Ho Zhili chose to quit the national team and went to Japan to marry a Japanese man, Hideyuki Koyama.
With the help of her husband, she joined the Japanese national team, changed her name to Zhili Koyama, and in the final of the 1994 Asian Games in Hiroshima, Zhili Koyama defeated China's "big devil" Deng Yaping 3:1 to help Japan win the championship.
After the game, she frequently shouted "Yoxi" to express her joy, which attracted strong dissatisfaction from the Chinese audience and was called a "traitor", and in the following years, she also defeated Chinese players in international competitions many times, was received by the Japanese emperor three times, and was treated favorably in the Japanese table tennis world.
Later, because her husband Hideyuki Koyama had an affair with a Japanese female player on Tomori Koyama's team, Tomori Koyama filed for divorce.
After the divorce, she continued to use her husband's surname Tomori Koyama to work as a coach in the Japanese table tennis arena, and now Tomori Koyama lives alone in Japan and often misses her hometown.
Since her divorce in 1996, she has not been married again and has no children, and although she is occasionally invited back to China to participate in activities, her sense of isolation in a foreign country has become stronger.
epilogue
The reasons why an athlete joins the nationality of another country must be varied.
But after becoming a citizen of another country, whether the athlete is "in Cao Ying's heart in Han" or holds a grudge against the motherland that raised him is more critical.
After all, the most important thing for a person is not to forget his roots.
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