On February 5, the Japan Table Tennis Association officially announced the list of participants of the Japanese table tennis team at the 2024 Paris Olympics.
Let's take a look at the list of Japan's Olympic team:
Men's team entry list: Tomokazu Haramoto, Hayasuke Togami and Shinozuka Daito.
Women's team entry list: Hina Hayata, Miu Hirano, Miwa Zhangmoto.
Mixed doubles entries: Tomokazu Zhangmoto, Hina Hayata.
Tokyo Olympics mixed doubles champion, women's team runner-up, women's singles third place winner, now ranked 10th in the world, Misei Ito missed the Paris Olympics.
History always bears striking parallels, and in 2016, at the age of 15, Ito became a member of Japan's Rio Olympic team. In 2024, 15-year-old Miwa Harimoto squeezed out Mimato Ito to become a member of Japan's Paris Olympic team.
Thinking that back then, Ito Misei alone completely beat China's three absolute main forces Ding Ning, Zhu Yuling, and Liu Shiwen, and Ito Misei single-handedly rewrote the selection rules of the Chinese women's table tennis Olympic team, thus catalyzing the early completion of the replacement of the old and new Chinese women's table tennis.
At the Tokyo Olympics, the Ito Mimako/Mizutani Hayabusa combination unexpectedly defeated Liu Shiwen/Xu Xin and won the first mixed doubles gold medal in the history of Olympic table tennis.
When Sun Yingsha successfully blocked Misei Ito in the women's singles semifinals of the Tokyo Olympics, Sun Yingsha was regarded as an anti-Japanese hero by Chinese fans, and Liu Guoliang even thought that Sun Yingsha's women's singles silver medal was no less significant than the gold medal.
After the Tokyo Olympics, Ito Misei has been ranked in the top 10 in the world in the world, but it is almost difficult to win against the national table tennis Jinhua, and his personal edge has plummeted. Her position as the first sister in Japan was also surpassed by Hina Hayata, and she repeatedly lost to Miu Hirano and Miwa Zhang in domestic competition. Due to his clear and prominent personal consciousness, Ito Misei was suppressed intentionally or unintentionally by the Japanese Table Tennis Association.
In the second half of 2023, Zhang Benmeihe began to make a strong debut, and successively represented the Japanese team in the Hangzhou Asian Games, WTT Frankfurt Championships, Chengdu Mixed Team World Cup and other competitions. Even in the face of the world's No. 1 Sun Yingsha and Wang Manyu, the absolute main force of the national table tennis Jinhua, Zhang Benmeihe also played well.
In the end, a generation of newcomers defeated the old, and the romance was always blown away by the rain and wind, and the Japanese Table Tennis Association chose the younger and more malleable Zhang Benmei to compete in the Paris Olympics.
This is exactly what it is:
Hinojo Masanori Ito,
Once debuted, the world heard about it.
How popular it was back then,
The Chinese women's table tennis panicked.
Tokyo cried Liu Shiwen,
The mixed doubles gold medal was held in Japan.
Helpless the first person of the year,
Three years later, it was gone.