2024 will be a very important year, with the Paris Olympic Games, before the Paris Olympics, a series of events will be treated by the main force of national table tennis, among which the opening drama of 2024 is the men's table tennis finals in 2023, which is also the first major event in 2024. The points, prize money, and gold content of this competition are very high, and the previous women's finals have been a great success, and I believe that this men's finals will also attract the attention of table tennis fans around the world.
The men's singles players are required to be ranked in the top 16, and the men's doubles players are required to be ranked in the top 8 to be qualified. The world's second-ranked Men's Doubles pair of Lim Jong-hoon and Jang Woo-jin from South Korea withdrew for personal reasons, and the Singaporean pair made it to the year-end men's finals.
For Lin Zhongxun and Zhang Yuzhen, national table tennis fans are not very unfamiliar with them, they will perform very well in 2023, and the World Table Tennis Championships will also reach the final, creating the best result in the competition since the two partners. Although they lost to Fan Zhendong and Wang Chuqin in the final, everyone can see that the men's doubles combination can bring a certain amount of pressure to the national table tennis, and they have been beating Fan Zhendong and Wang Chuqin for a long time to rank first in the world, until the World Table Tennis Championships lost the championship, Wang Chuqin and Fan Zhendong completed the overtake and became the current men's doubles ranked No. 1 player in the world, so the two of them are still very strong.
Everyone has also seen in the previous women's finals that the Chinese team will not lose foreign wars, so everyone hopes that the table tennis competition, especially these foreign players, can create some danger and trouble for the Chinese team, because we don't want to always see China's civil war, and we hope to see a certain amount of pressure among the Chinese team and foreign players, and the combination of Lin Zhongxun and this Zhang Yuzhen will actually give the Chinese men's doubles a certain amount of pressure.
And in all the world's top competitions in the past two years, the championship that the Chinese team lost was the 2021 World Table Tennis Championships, when our men's doubles lost the championship, and the rest were like Grand Slams and Champions Cup. and large-scale events like the World Table Tennis Championships, we basically won't lose the championship. Therefore, the withdrawal of this South Korean combination has undoubtedly made it extremely difficult for national table tennis fans to want to see such a wonderful duel between foreign players against the Chinese team.
At present, this time in the men's finals, in addition to Zhang Benzhihe in the men's singles, if he can play at a super level and create some trouble for the Chinese team, I am afraid that it will be difficult for other players in men's doubles and men's singles to create too much threat to the Chinese team.