See you in court Australian Olympic medal hopeful banned for seven years

We’re sorry, this feature is currently unavailable. We’re working to restore it. Please try again later. Add articles to your saved list and come back to them any time. China’s domination of global markets like critical minerals has caused angst among Western nations including Australia, not least because of the potential implications for their national security.Best porn XXX. The geopolitics of sport are far less consequential but Beijing’s pre-eminence in the world of table tennis has brought its own concerns and Australia’s best-ranked player has been tangled up in it. Yangzi Liu competes for Australia at the Commonwealth Games in Birmingham, where she won two bronze medals.Credit: Getty Images Yangzi Liu, 22, was the first Australian woman to win a Commonwealth Games medal in singles in Birmingham two years ago, and in March soared to No.25 in the world rankings, the highest mark reached by a female Australian. But she won’t be representing Australia at the Paris Olympics next month nor, as it stands, at the following Games in Los Angeles in 2028, unless she succeeds in a case she is taking to the Court of Arbitration for Sport against the game’s governing body, the International Table Tennis Federation. Her case relates to stringent eligibility rules brought in by the ITTF to counter the proliferation of players, many from China, who changed their nationalities to compete for other countries, standing in the way of locally developed athletes. Hailing from the Chinese province of Henan, Liu rose the ranks at one of China’s most feted academies, the Cao Yanhua Table Tennis Club in Shanghai, before relocating to Portugal then Australia at the age of 17 in 2019. Three years later, with the sponsorship of Table Tennis Australia, she was granted Australian citizenship. However, she is unable to play for Australia at the Olympics or world championships until 2029 under the ITTF regulations, which has introduced waiting periods of between one and nine years, depending on one’s age, from the date players who switched allegiances were registered by the federation of their adopted nations. Liu is banned for seven years from the Olympics and world titles because she was over the age of 18 when her registration by Australia was accepted by the ITTF in 2022. She is not contesting the merits of table tennis’ policy itself but has launched a bid to shorten her waiting period, which at present means she would not be able to compete for Australia at the Olympics until Brisbane in 2032, when she will be 30. Backed by Table Tennis Australia in her challenge to the Lausanne-based Court of Arbitration for Sport, Liu is understood to be claiming her Olympic ambitions have been cruelled by a technicality and the clock for her should have started for her not in 2022 but in 2020. It was in that year that Table Tennis Australia registered her with the ITTF but due to an apparent administrative failure it took two years for the registration to be recognised by table tennis’s controlling entity, which is also headquartered in Switzerland. Crucially, had she began her imposed time out of major competitions in 2020 she would have been still under 18 and forced to wait five years rather than seven, making her available to wear the green and gold from 2025. French President Emmanuel Macron plays table tennis while Paris 2024 Olympics Organising Committee President Tony Estanguet looks on at a pre-Games event in Paris.Credit: AP That alternative timeline means that even if she does win in her legal tilt, Liu still wouldn’t be able to join the Australian Olympic team in Paris. But her predicament highlights one of the toughest barriers facing naturalised athletes in individual sports. Under the Olympic Charter, athletes need only to be a national of a country to represent it at the Olympics, or wait three years if they have already represented another nation, which can be waived. But sports federations’ own eligibility requirements are permitted to cover Olympic competition and table tennis’ version of protectionism, implemented in 2018, is among them. The provisions don’t refer specifically to China, where table tennis is the national sport. But Chinese players outside its national team have migrated to play under other flags with such abundance over the years that they were the subject of an academic study released last year. The paper, published by Dutch professor Gijsbert Oonk and master’s student Alexander Oonk, said that of the 811 athletes to play table tennis at the Olympics since it first featured in Seoul in 1988, 127 were Chinese-born players representing other nations. They sought opportunity elsewhere “because the local competition was fierce” to play for China, which has won 32 of the 37 Olympic gold medals that have been handed out since then, and 60 of the 115 medals. “It’s not a problem. It’s an issue,” the then-ITTF president Thomas Weikert said in an interview in 2016 with The New York Times, which reported that 31 per cent of athletes in table tennis at that year’s Olympics in Rio de Janeiro represented countries other than the one they were born in. The percentage was more than double that of the next closest sport, basketball. Australia has been a destination for others before Liu, with 10 Chinese-born players competing for the country at the Olympics, and Table Tennis Australia has had its own migration support policy covering migration requests from players and coaches abroad. Liu was ranked outside the world’s top 500 players when she arrived in Australia, initially on a student visa, settling in Sydney before shifting to Melbourne, where the national squad trains. Within three years she had burst into the top 50 and was a genuine rising star, topping it off by bringing home two bronze medals from the Commonwealth Games, at which the ITTF waiting periods do not apply. This masthead was told Liu was also unable to comment with a hearing before the Court of Arbitration for Sport pending. But a page set up on the GoFundMe crowdfunding site to raise money for her case says she “has had her Olympic dreams stalled due to administration hurdle imposed by the International Federation”. “Yangzi Liu, with the support of Table Tennis Australia, is seeking legal action to rectify this decision to ensure that Yangzi has the opportunity to represent Australia at the Olympics Games in Los Angeles in 2028 and beyond,” says a fundraising appeal on the page which was posted anonymously. The ITTF and Table Tennis Australia were contacted for comment. News, results and expert analysis from the weekend of sport sent every Monday. Sign up for our Sport newsletter. Copyright © 2024