The Jonah Lomus of ping pong

By PETER CALDER

They say white men can't jump, although Cuban high flyer Javier Sotomayor gives the lie to that.

All right, he's not exactly white but he's certainly not black either - just your regular swarthy Hispanic. But he's also the only man to break the magic eight-foot barrier and a virtual shoo-in for the high jump gold medal.

That aside, you don't need to know much about sport to predict the outcome of some Olympic contests. In the three-letter country code alongside athletes' names you may read the story's final chapter before the book is even open.

Who would be surprised that the Brazilians beat the Swedes at beach volleyball? Or the Cubans hammered the Bulgarians? What kind of contest is that?

No doubt there is a girl from Sofia and a girl from Uppsala to rival the beauty of the girl from Ipanema but you can bet they aren't tall and tanned and young and lovely, they don't wear G-string bikinis and they don't play beach volleyball.

Beach volleyball is best played on a beach, one assumes. A sandpit under lights in a heated gymnasium while a blizzard roars outside is not the place to prepare for Olympic competition. That's why champion Swedish beach volleyballers are as common as Nordic skiers from Chad or Bolivian sailboarders.

Or table tennis players with non-Chinese names. Kiwi hearts may have fluttered slightly yesterday when "our" girl went down fighting to world No. 1 Wang Nan. But check "our" girl's name: Li Chunli, who's here with her sister Karen.

Run your eye down the list of male contenders. The Argentinian Liu Song, the Austrian Ding Yi, the American Cheng Yinghua. Among the women, Miao Miao and the Zhou sisters step up for Australia and Tian Jing is carrying the German flag. Meantime, most of the stars of the team from Japan, a major world table tennis force, are former Chinese champions.

The Chinese global domination of table tennis is apparently absolute. The country took five out of the six women's gold medals at the last three Olympics and four out of six of the men's. Of Wang Nan's major Olympic rivals all but one of the top eight are Chinese-born.

"Table tennis players are our Jonah Lomus," one Chinese journalist here told me yesterday. And it's not hard to see why. The game is the national sport - it's called "guoqiu" which means "national ball." Around 100 million Chinese play it regularly and five million are in serious competition.

"With that many competition players, you have to expect that talent is going to float," says New Zealand coach Murray Finch.

In schools in Beijing, parents pay 60 yuan (about $16) a month to have their children, some pre-school age, train for three hours a day, seven days a week.

"The players know that if they slack off their training for a couple of weeks, they'll go back home," says Finch. "You'll never see them again because there are five players ready to take their place."

Taiwanese journalist I Chen Chia, here to cover the sport, agrees and says the diaspora of Chinese talent results from the fact that players of less than stratospheric potential have no chance to get in the national team.

But as more Chinese take the top spots in national sides, the game threatens to become an all-Chinese affair.

Says Finch: "If I had a daughter I would advise her not to play table tennis because as soon as she gets any good they'll give her the heave-ho and get another Chinese in."