The Table Tennis Singles World Cup is about to restart in Macau, China, although Germany's main Boll and Ocharov have given up participating, there are still many athletes who have won the singles championship of the event, but almost all of them are national table tennis players, and there is only one person left in the foreign association, but it is a famous player who has created a historical record:
- First of all, she is the only non-Chinese athlete from the Foreign Association to have won the World Cup women's singles event;
- Secondly, she is the youngest singles world champion in table tennis history.
In 2016, at the age of 16, Miu Hirano became famous and won the World Cup women's singles championship, which has also become an unprecedented achievement that is difficult to surpass, do you remember?
Born on April 14, 2000, Miu Hirano is a rising star in the Rio Olympic cycle, although she was not very famous at the time, and the limelight was often overshadowed by another younger team-mate, Mimato Ito (born 21 October 2000).
Before the start of the Rio Olympics, Ito already had a record of defeating the national table tennis Olympic champion Ding Ning, and at the Rio Olympics, Ito participated in the team competition at the age of 15, while Miu Hirano lost to the opponent in the team competition and finally missed the direct entry to Brazil.
However, no one expected that just a few months later, the status of the two in the table tennis world would be reversed.
In October 2016, Miu Hirano and Misei Ito played in the Women's World Cup held in the United States together, no one expected that the Chinese team had an unexpected situation, and the two athletes who were originally scheduled to participate in Ding Ning and Liu Shiwen chose to give up participating.
Since the first women's table tennis World Cup was held in 1996, the Chinese team has not been absent, only to be interrupted in 2016, which gave all the other participating athletes a chance to win the championship.
And the result of this competition is that Miu Hirano became the final winner.
In that year's Women's World Cup, Miu Hirano defeated Romanian world runner-up Samara, teammate Misei Ito, and Singapore world champion Feng Tianwei to advance to the women's singles final, and finally swept Chinese Taipei's Zheng Yijing 4-0, thus becoming the first and so far last non-Chinese champion in the history of the event.
Looking back at Miyu Hirano's championship that year, it was indeed a bit of a fluke, after all, the situation of the national table tennis abandonment had never occurred before, so many people, including Liu Guoliang, the head coach of the Chinese team at the time, felt that the Japanese teenager was able to reach the top mainly because of good luck.
However, it wasn't long before Miu Hirano proved to everyone with another gold medal: In addition to luck, I still have strength!
In April 2017, Miu Hirano shook the table tennis world at the Asian Championships where the national table tennis was playing, defeating Ding Ning, Zhu Yuling, and Chen Meng in a row to win the women's singles championship, which opened the prelude to the Sino-Japanese table tennis confrontation in the Tokyo Olympic cycle, but soon after, she fell into a career trough of nearly six years, and it was not until 2023 that she re-emerged to defeat the main force of national table tennis Sun Yingsha, Wang Yidi and others.
It is already very difficult for today's table tennis players to replicate Miyu Hirano's World Cup winning experience: the young Chinese team may not be able to get a chance, and the opportunity is not precocious enough, and the new stars of the foreign association may never encounter the situation of all national table tennis withdrawals.
This year, Zhang will compete at the age of 15, so can she break the record of her predecessors?