‘I play with happiness’: the table tennis star making her Olympic debut at 58

Zhiying Zeng isn’t worried about traveling to Portugal’s world-class table tennis training facility, the Mirandela Center, to prepare for Paris with her Olympic cohorts. “I’d rather train here,” she says, gesturing to her surroundings in a sports complex in Santiago de Chile. The table tennis hall is in the basement and subject to vibrations from the team sports swirling above.

Zeng trains here Monday through Friday, three hours a day. She would like to do more, but she has an excuse as she contemplates her Olympic debut: she will be 58 just before the Paris Games begin later this month. “When you’re young, nothing hurts,” she says with a smile. “Now I get shoulder pain if I play too much.”

Zeng’s reluctance to train in Portugal stems from her love of her native Chile, where she has been able to remain close to her husband and sons for 35 years. Her Spanish is peppered with local slang and she frequently jokes with Chilean self-deprecating humor.

Her Olympic dream began when she was on a professional youth team in China in the 1970s. It wasn’t until May that she achieved her goal by winning a series of tournaments and finishing in the top eight of the Americas region, securing her place in Paris.

It’s a turn of events that even Zeng couldn’t have predicted. She retired from professional table tennis in 1986, at age 20, and now owns a furniture business in her home in Iquique, northern Chile.

The Covid-19 pandemic provided an unexpected path back to table tennis. To quell her restlessness during Chile’s strict lockdown, she bought a table tennis table and played alone at home for hours every day. When the lockdown was lifted, she entered a number of local tournaments for fun, winning them all with ease. In 2023, she was the country’s highest-ranked female player and qualified for a spot on the Chile national team.

“Nobody could believe it – ‘“What are we going to do with this, ma’am?”she jokes.

As part of the Chilean women’s team, she won first place in the South Americans 2023 and bronze at the 2023 Pan American Games. In the singles, she qualified to represent Chile in Paris.

Zeng’s spectacular sporting story began in 1966, when she was born in Guangzhou Province, the daughter of an engineer father and a table tennis coach mother. Table tennis was immensely popular during her childhood, especially after the table tennis diplomacy of 1971, when the US table tennis team became the first official US delegation to visit Beijing since 1949. Their visit paved the way for Richard Nixon’s visit the following year.

Zeng remembers seeing ping-pong tables everywhere as a child: “Table tennis is to the Chinese what football is to the Brazilians.”

Zeng was coached by her mother, and her skills were evident from an early age. At age 11, Zeng was accepted into an elite junior team at a military school in Beijing, when Chinese professional sports were overseen by the People’s Liberation Army. After military supervision of sports ended in 1981, the school was closed, and Zeng returned to train under her mother.

In 1983, Zeng was selected for the Chinese national table tennis team and aspired to represent the country on the biggest stage: “It is every player’s dream to go to the Olympics.”

But her ambitions were thwarted in 1986 by the introduction of the “two-colour rule”, which required players to use two-coloured paddles. This allowed players to see what surface their opponents were using and predict the speed and spin of the ball. The change was simply too much for Zeng, who had played with single-coloured paddles since she was a child. “The rule ruined my game,” she says. “I felt weak, psychologically and technically.”

She retired from the national team and “hardly played” until a Chinese coach in Chile offered her a job coaching schoolchildren in 1989. The move to a faraway, foreign country appealed to her: “I no longer thought about becoming a professional player, but a coach.”

Zeng took the job and mingled with the small, close-knit Chinese community in northern Chile. There she was introduced to the thriving import business and eventually gave up coaching in favor of a career trading Chinese goods. She became known as “Tania” among Chileans. “In Chile, they can’t pronounce my name, they have trouble with the Z … but like all the Chinese who come here, we use a Chilean name,” she says. “So I [chose] “Tania.”

Her teenage son’s addiction to video games led her to pick up the bat again in 2002. She encouraged him to exercise more – and put down the video games – and took him to her local table tennis club. Her talent created a buzz and soon she was playing in a local tournament. “I beat everyone,” she laughs. “After that, all my son wanted to do was play table tennis and he never played video games again … his personality changed too, sport gives you the confidence to tackle problems … I’m very proud of myself for making that decision.”

She never considered signing up for the Chile national team, “I had no idea that was even possible.” She retired from table tennis again and focused on her business for the next 20 years, until the pandemic brought her back to the sport.

Her coach and friend, Juan Lizama, says her Olympic potential was clear when he first saw her play in the 1990s: “She was extraordinary, the same level as today. She beat very famous players in South America, and beat them easily,” he says.

Zeng’s game is defensive; she responds to attacks with different “effects”; she hits to slow the ball down, or turns it to hide its direction. Lizama says that Zeng is best under pressure, “she will always win the difficult points, like the last one in a draw. She is calm.”

Lizama calls Zeng a “worldwide role model”. He adds: “She was retired for 20 years and within a year she won in the South Americansthen the Pan Americans, and now she’s going to the Olympics.”

When Chile hosted the 2023 Pan American Games, Zeng emerged as a national hero: the oldest athlete at the tournament and a medalist. Affectionately nicknamed “Tia Tania” by fans, she achieved more than 10,000 Instagram followers in a week. In the audience at one of Chile’s matches, a young fan told the press that they had only come to see “the table tennis grandma”.

Zeng is aware of her differences in Chile’s sporting landscape, standing out not only because of her age but also because of her immigrant background. Yet she insists she has never been discriminated against: “I have never had any problems and everyone recognizes my achievements.”

But there was a sour moment in Zeng’s time as an elite athlete: in February, she failed to make Chile’s team for the World Championships in South Korea, despite being the country’s highest-ranked female player.

Zeng is baffled by why she was excluded, but shrugs it off with characteristic drive. “In sports, nothing is given for free. I’ll just keep playing,” she says.

It is that unwavering self-confidence that has carried Zeng, against all odds, to Paris 2024. She is happy to be an inspiration.

“At my age, you have to play with luck, not with fear,” she says, stressing how proud she is to represent Chile. “I love this country. I didn’t achieve my dream in China, and here I do. It’s important not to give up.”