On April 20, the semifinals of the 2024 Macau Men's World Cup ended, Lin Gaoyuan defeated Japan's Tomokazu Zhang 4-0, and Ma Long defeated Wang Chuqin 4-0, and the national table tennis won the championship and runner-up in this competition. In the final, Lin Gaoyuan will face Ma Long.
In this men's World Cup, a total of 6 national table tennis players played, and all 6 of them qualified from the group and advanced to the top 16 knockout rounds. Liang Jingkun lost to Sweden's Anton Carlberg 3-4 in the first round of the knockout round, and Lin Shidong lost to Fan Zhendong 3-4, and the two missed the quarterfinals. Fan Zhendong lost to Lin Gaoyuan 2-4 in the quarterfinals and missed the semifinals. In addition to Lin Gaoyuan, Wang Chuqin defeated South Korea's Zhang Yuzhen 4-1, Ma Long defeated Japan's Hayasuke Togami 4-2, and three national table tennis players advanced to the semifinals. The other semi-final spot went to Japan's Tomokazu Haramoto, who beat Carlberg 4-2 to seal a medal. It is worth mentioning that Tomokazu Zhangmoto's younger sister Miwa Zhang broke into the semifinals of the Women's World Cup, and the two became the first brother and sister to win medals in the singles competition of the World Cup.
The first semi-final was a national table tennis civil war, with men's singles world No. 1 Wang Chuqin facing double Grand Slam winner Ma Long. Since winning the men's singles championship at the Hangzhou Asian Games in the second half of last year, Wang Chuqin has won the WTT Doha men's finals and the Singapore Grand Slam men's singles championship, but he has not won the singles world championship, and this World Cup is Wang Chuqin's first time participating in the singles World Cup. Ma Long won the men's World Cup twice in 2012 and 2015. In this game, Ma Long won four games in a row 11-9, 12-10, 11-6, 14-12, defeated Wang Chuqin 4-0, and advanced to the singles World Cup final for the fifth time in his career. After the game, Malone bluntly said that the result of the game was beyond his imagination, and the secret to winning was to relax, hoping that he could be as relaxed in the final as this one.
The second semi-final was a Sino-Japanese matchup. Lin Gaoyuan finished third at the Men's World Cup in 2018, Tomokazu Zhang finished on the podium at two consecutive singles World Cups, finished runner-up in the final in 2019 and finished third in 2020. In this game, in the first game, Lin Gaoyuan scored 5 points in a row when he was 5-6 behind, got the game point at 10-5, and won the first game with 11-9.
In the second game, Lin Gaoyuan made a 4-1 start and won another game 11-6. In the third game, the scores of the two sides in the first half of the game were tight, and Lin Gaoyuan exerted his strength in the second half of the game and won the game 11-6, leading 3-0. In the fourth game, Lin Gaoyuan was full of firepower and won 11-1, defeating Tomokazu Zhang with a big score of 4-0. In the final, Lin Gaoyuan will compete with Ma Long for the championship.