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In the recently concluded table tennis WTT Olomouc feeder tournament, the Chinese women’s table tennis team suffered a critical blow. Not only were the women’s singles and women’s doubles completely defeated, but the mixed doubles team that cooperated with the men’s team also failed to win the championship. In the first two events, all six games lost were to the Japanese team’s choppers Hashimoto Honoka and Sato Hitomi, and they only won one game in total.

Women’s Doubles:Wang Xiaotong/Han Feier lost 0-3 to Hashimoto Honoka/Sato Hitomi in the semifinals, and Yang Yiyun/Zhu Sibing lost 0-3 to Hashimoto Honoka/Sato Hitomi in the finals;

Women’s Singles:Wang Xiaotong lost 0-3 to Hashimoto Honoka in the round of 16, Qin Yuxuan lost 0-3 to Hashimoto Honoka in the quarterfinals (beaten 0-11 in a single game), Han Feier lost 0-3 to Hashimoto Honoka in the semifinals, and Yang Yiyun lost 1-3 to Hashimoto Honoka in the final.

In addition, before the Paris Olympics, China's world champion main player Chen Xingtong was defeated by South Korean chopper Xu Xiaoyuan, and she has also lost to choppers such as Hashimoto Honoka and Han Ying in the past. It seems that the women's team really needs to work hard to deal with choppers!

Slicing is a style of table tennis that is mainly based on backspin and defense. It was very popular in the early days of table tennis and produced many world champions. However, with the development of fast attack and loop ball technology (especially the latter), slicing players have gradually been marginalized and have not won singles world championships since the 1990s.

Since male players are relatively strong and have great offensive lethality, defensive chopping has gradually withdrawn from the front line. Female players are relatively weaker, and offensive players are sometimes not as effective as male chopping players in breaking through defensive chopping. Therefore, chopping has retained a place in the top field, but it is also difficult to reach the top of table tennis.

Taking the Chinese and Japanese women's teams as an example, the Chinese national table tennis team still relied on Wu Yang to participate in the Team World Cup during the Rio Olympic cycle, but after the start of the Tokyo Olympic cycle, the main force no longer saw the chopper; the Japanese team also had chopper Sato Hitomi participating in the Team World Table Tennis Championships in 2022, and now her position in the team has also fallen behind the top five.

Currently, among the top teams in the world table tennis world, only Germany's Han Ying can qualify for the Olympics and other major competitions, but she is already a 41-year-old veteran who withdrew from the Paris Olympics due to injury. Judging from the current record, Hashimoto Honoka is already the strongest chopper in the current women's table tennis field.

Hashimoto Honoka was born in 1998. She is not young anymore and became famous relatively early. She was ranked 13th in the world at the age of 19. She later defeated China's world table tennis champion Chen Xingtong. However, she was unable to join the ranks of Japan's main players for several years until she showed her strength again around the Paris Olympics.

In the WTT Bangkok Star Tournament held in early July, Hashimoto Honoka defeated Japanese and Korean main players Zhang Ben Miwa and Shin Yubin to win the women's singles runner-up (lost to Ito Mima in the final); after the end of the Olympics in August, Hashimoto Honoka broke through the six defense lines of the Chinese national table tennis team in the WTT Olomouc feeder tournament in one breath, and scored a huge score difference of 11-0 in a single game, showing a very strong impact.

At present, it seems that the young players of the national table tennis team still have obvious shortcomings when dealing with chopping players. The reason for this is, on the one hand, that people pay more attention to the backhand in the general environment, but dealing with the chopping style requires very solid forehand skills; on the other hand, because there are fewer and fewer masters of chopping, things are rare and valuable, and it is relatively more difficult for others to adapt to their ball paths.

In addition, compared to dealing with choppers, the bigger problem facing the Chinese women's table tennis team at present may be that there is currently no player with outstanding strength among the young generation born after 2004. The gap between the current best-performing player, Kuaiman, and players from foreign associations, such as Shin Yubin, Kihara Miyu, and Zhang Ben Miwa, is getting bigger and bigger. The performances of other young players are not as good as her, which is indeed worrying. I hope it will attract the attention of the coaching staff.