On May 18, after the International Table Tennis Federation announced the mixed doubles pairs for the Paris Olympic Games, before the deadline set by the International Olympic Games, the Olympic Committees of each association confirmed all the Olympic quotas they had obtained. At this point, the dust has settled on the 16 mixed doubles pairs of table tennis at the Paris Olympics, and Wang Chuqin/Sun Yingsha will represent the national table tennis and bear the heavy responsibility of hitting the first gold medal for the national table tennis in the Paris Olympics.
After the announcement of the ITTF World Rankings on May 7, the 16 pairs of participants in the Paris Olympics have been released, but they still need to wait for the final confirmation of the national or regional Olympic committees. According to the rules, a total of 16 mixed doubles pairs will participate in the Paris Olympics, with 9 quota places for the various continental trials and Olympic qualification tournaments, and the remaining 7 quota places according to the world rankings.
The 16 pairs are China's Wang Chuqin/Sun Yingsha, Korea's Lim Jong-hoon/Shin Yu-bin, Japan's Tomokazu Zhangmoto/Hina Hayata, Chinese Taipei's Lin Yunru/Chen Siyu, Spain's Alvaro Robles/Xiao Yaoqian, Hong Kong's Wong Chun-ting/To Hoi Kim, Romania's Ovidou Ionescu/Bernadette Szokos, Hungary's Nandor Eksage/Dora Madaratz, Germany's Qiu Dang/Nina Mittram, Brazil's Witte Ash/Takahashi Bruna, France's Alex Lebrun/Yuan Jianan, Sweden's Christian Carlsen/Christina Carlberg, Cuba's Jorge Campos/Daniela Fonseca Karazana, Egypt's Omar Assal/Tina Meshef, Australia's Lim Moon-jung/Ji Min-hyung, North Korea's Lee Jung-sik/Kim E.m. Young.
Mixed Doubles made its Olympic debut at the Tokyo Games, becoming the fifth event of table tennis at the Games, but the first event to reach its final, with only one or more pairs from each team qualifying for the Games. At the Tokyo Olympics, Xu Xin/Liu Shiwen represented the national table tennis in the mixed doubles, and they reached the final and finally lost to the Japanese combination Mizutani Hayabusa/Ito Misei and missed the gold medal, which was also the only gold medal lost by the national table tennis in the Tokyo Olympics. Mizutani Hayabusa/Ito became the first table tennis mixed doubles gold medallists in Olympic history. After the end of the Tokyo Olympics, Mizutani Hayabusa retired, Ito Misei failed to qualify for the Paris Olympics, Xu Xin and Liu Shiwen also left the national team, and the Paris Olympics table tennis mixed doubles event will produce a new champion, and the national table tennis combination Wang Chuqin/Sun Yingsha has become the favorite to win the championship.
The mixed doubles event will be held from 27 to 30 July in Hall 4 of the Arena de Paris Sud, France, and the mixed doubles gold medal will be awarded on 30 July, which is also the first gold medal in table tennis at the Paris Olympics. The participating pairs will be seeded according to the world rankings announced on July 16, and Wang Chuqin/Sun Yingsha, who are currently the top seeds in the mixed doubles world after winning the World Table Tennis Championships and WTT Grand Slam in the Paris Olympic cycle, will next compete in the WTT Taiyuan Challenger Regular Challenger, where they will not be surpassed by other pairs in the world rankings. Due to the fact that the national table tennis failed to win the mixed doubles gold medal at the Tokyo Olympics, and the mixed doubles at the Paris Olympics has become a must-win event for the national table tennis, Wang Chuqin and Sun Yingsha bear considerable responsibility and pressure, both of them will have three at the Paris Olympics, and the success or failure of the mixed doubles event will also affect their subsequent performance.