Jade Charles and Yehong Zhu
Press Officers, Easter 2017
Email: [email protected]
Cambridge, 31 July 2017
Press Release: Monday, May 15, 2017
DR. DENG YAPING
Ping pong champion Dr. Deng Yaping came to the Cambridge to speak to about the value of
perseverance and heart, in athletics and academia.
Her first story was about ping pong. As a little girl she had dreams to become a world champion,
a goal that she eventually achieved by beating many other world champions along the way.
During a period of 4 years, she trained 13 hours a day, 7 days a week. She used a training
message called “multiple training,” which she explains is the hardest training method in ping
pong. Using this method, she won a national championship when she was 13 years old.
She explains that she should have been on the national team much earlier, but 4/5 coaches had
disagreed. Given her petite frame, nobody thought she had any chance to beat “strong, tall
European girls,” so she was rejected. Eventually, however, a coach convinced her that her
shortness was not a disadvantage, but a better way to see the ball coming at her. “So I attacked,
many times, without any defense. I didn’t need a defense—I saw all the chances for me.”
Eventually she became the youngest ping pong champion in world history, at the age of 16. She
started dominating the sport around the world, and kept her #1 ranking for 8 years. She
explained that a huge advantage she had was her competitive spirit: “we have a saying in ping
pong, that a good attack is the best defense.” Over the course of her career, she won 18 world
titles, including 4 Olympic gold medals. Her dreams as a little girl to become a world champion
had come true, not just because of talent, she said, but because of hard work and persistence.
Her second story was about her journey to graduate with a Cambridge Ph. D. In November
1997, she felt that she was one of the worst students in Tsinghua University. She had trouble
learning even the fundamentals of English, having spent most of her life training for ping pong.
However, her competitive spirit eventually kicked in, and she started studying extremely hard.
She graduated with a bachelor’s degree at Tsinghua, moving on to study a Master’s degree at the
University of Nottingham. After applying to Cambridge, she was accepted into a Ph. D program.
She spent a lot of time in the library, even taking meals there because she wanted to save time.
She needed to write 600,000 words in order to complete her program, and unless she finished
her PHD dissertation and the resulting defense, she wouldn’t be able to graduate from
Cambridge. She explained that in China, this would have been extremely embarrassing, and she
would have “lost face.” Fortunately, after 5 years of studying a Ph. D, she was finally successful,
passing her course, and graduating from the University of Cambridge on November 30, 2008.
Her third story was about Beijing winning the bid for the 2008 Olympics, a source of national
pride for China. She explains how the Olympics left a great legacy for China, bringing a world of
benefit—in terms of quality of life, quality of construction, worldwide tourism revenue, and new
jobs—to the Chinese people. She explains that her new dream is to promote sports for all, no
matter who they are or where they come from, and also to promote philanthropy for the less
fortunate, namely by volunteering and raising money for athletes with disabilities.