“Not willing to accept it”
Quake in table tennis: Olympic champions retire
12/29/2024 – 4:56 p.mReading time: 2 minutes
In Paris, Chen Meng and Fan Zhendong won Olympic gold. But there will be no more victories in the near future.
The Chinese Olympic champions Fan Zhendong and Chen Meng do not want to play any more international tournaments for the time being in protest against the World Table Tennis (WTT) tournament series. Both announced their withdrawal from the table tennis world rankings on the Chinese social media platform Weibo, but expressly did not speak of an end to their careers.
27-year-old Fan Zhendong and 30-year-old Chen Meng won gold medals in the individual and team competitions at the Paris Olympics. Afterwards, both took a break and decided not to take part in several WTT competitions. They were then punished with newly introduced fines that are due if they fail to show up. Fan Zhendong said on his Weibo profile: “I can’t afford this and can only decide to leave the world rankings.”
The two-time individual world champion and long-time world number one said: “I’m really not willing to accept that, but I still respect the international organizations. So I can only decide to withdraw from the world rankings.”
World Table Tennis is a subsidiary organization of the world association ITTF. A statement from WTT expresses “deep respect” for Fan Zhendong and Chen Meng, but also justifies its own rules. They are not new and serve to “offer players, fans and all partners events of the highest quality.”
For 2025, WTT announced some changes such as higher prize money and more long-term tournament planning. But the criticism from players and coaches of the tournament series, which was presented with big plans and has so far fallen far short of all expectations, has been great, not just since the dispute with Fan Zhendong and Chen Meng.
Top German players like Dimitrij Ovtcharov also complain that they can earn far less on the WTT tour than they were promised when it was introduced four years ago. Instead, the competition and travel demands are very high and the tournaments are scheduled at very short notice.
Ovtcharov and record European champion Timo Boll, who is particularly popular in China, expressed their respect for Fan Zhendong on their Weibo accounts. The French Bundesliga professional Simon Gauzy from TTF Ochsenhausen posted on the X platform that he did not accept the WTT declaration. “We are losing icons of our sport because of such ‘rules,'” he wrote.