Tokyo 2020: China’s women putting the men to shame

Despite loss to Rose Namajunas, Zhang Weili shows that women are leading the way in UFC while Olympic sports are no different
Women’s teams have qualified for Tokyo 2020 where men’s teams have struggled and social media users have asked why

Jonathan White

Published: 4:00pm, 3 May 2021

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The last week was not a great one for Chinese sport on the international stage.

UFC strawweight champion Zhang Weili lost to Rose Namajunas in the most dramatic fashion at UFC 261 in Florida.

The other three Chinese fighters on the card, all graduates of the China Academy based out of the UFC’s Shanghai Performance Centre, each lost their debut fights too.

Some Chinese fans turned on Zhang after her first round loss, with complaints that they had paid six yuan (US$0.93) to watch.

Rose Namajunas celebrates after beating Zhang Weili for the strawweight title at UFC 261. Photo: AFP

It also appears that Chinese footballer Wu Lei will cut short his stint in Spain with Espanyol.

Aside from watching from the stands as an unused substitute in the second tier, China’s star player will need to leave in the coming days to pass quarantine ahead of his country’s upcoming Fifa 2022 World Cup qualifiers.

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In the UK, snooker hope Yan Bingtao fell at the second round of the World Championships, the last man standing of the five Chinese players to make the first round.

It has now been 15 years since the world expected an imminent Chinese world champion when Ding Junhui burst onto the scene. Yan won the Masters earlier this year and time is on the 21-year-old’s side, but Ding is proof of how difficult the next step is.

Doom and gloom pervades, even when there is good news the glass is never seen as half full.

Take the Chinese women’s football team who dramatically booked their ticket for the delayed Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games with victory over South Korea last month.

Their reward was what Chinese media have called the “group of death” in Tokyo.

Maybe they are looking to hedge expectations and couch disappointment but it is as far from a group of death as they could have got. It’s more like the holy grail, given that China got the lowest ranked team in each pot.

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The irony is that this group of death came days after the celebrations on making Tokyo. The Steel Roses were front page news with star player Wang Shuang the focus.

Wang had been praised as a generational talent with South Korean media suggesting that she beat them single-handed. With three of China’s four goals across the two-legs, they were not far off.

Online, the topic was trending, with millions of reads in the aftermath of the second leg.

In the following days there was a bit more soul searching, more of that doom and gloom so beloved by sports fans, as they took aim at the misfiring men’s football team.

“Why do Chinese women’s basketball, football and volleyball teams perform better than the men?” they asked. It was one of the most read hashtags on China’s Twitter-like Weibo, with more than 100 million reads.

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They had a point.

China’s women’s teams have qualified for football, basketball and volleyball in Tokyo, while the men’s teams have failed to do so.

It is the same story with rugby sevens, where the women won the Asian qualifiers, and in field hockey.

While men’s basketball qualifiers will be finalised in June with China facing an uphill battle in their group in Victoria, Canada. There is more chance of foreign spectators being at the Olympics than the Chinese men realising their hoop dreams.

It was their turn to be national embarrassments after they hosted the 2019 Fiba World Cup and missed the chance to qualify directly as Asia’s best performing team.

The world No 22 Chinese baseball team can qualify for Tokyo if they overcome hosts Taiwan – 4th in the world – Australia (No 6) and Netherlands (No 9) in June’s postponed qualifiers. Again there’s more chance of snow disrupting the Summer Games.

Tokyo 2020: Chinese netizens ask why women’s teams are better than men’s

The fact is that no men’s teams have qualified while six women’s teams have and one of them – the volleyball team – is the reigning Olympic champion and Zhu Ting the MVP. They beat Japan handsomely in a Tokyo 2020 test event this past weekend.

It’s a stark contrast to both the men’s football teams, which has long been a punchline to the point where there were calls for women’s volleyball coach Lang Ping to take over the football.

Now basketball has joined the joke. At this year’s “Tucao Conference” television variety show former China football captain Fan Zhiyi and CBA Liaoning Flying Leopards team coach Yang Ming laid into each other’s respective sports.

Doom and gloom might be the preset of the sports fan, of course, but there should be hope – at least when it comes to China’s women.

Newly naturalised heptathlete Nina Schultz (known in China as Zheng Ninali) set a PB at the National Games test event, beating her score from winning silver at the 2018 Commonwealth Games.

She’s close to China’s national record and also the Tokyo qualification benchmark. Looking further ahead and naturalised ski star Eileen Gu (Gu Ailing) is expected to shine at the Beijing 2022 Winter Games. In between, Zhang might even get another shot at her belt.

There’s plenty to be hopeful about and it’s definitely worth six yuan to see how they get on.

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