On August 3, the table tennis competition of the Barcelona Olympics entered a critical day.

Within one day, the women's singles will have a semi-final match against the champion and runner-up.

In the men's singles, three rounds of group matches will be held in one day to determine the top 16, which shows the intensity.

At eight o'clock in the morning, the first to start was the semi-finals between Qiao Hong and Li Fengji of the Northern Dynasty.

Kong Zhendong was once again invited by Coach Zhang Xilin to watch the game.

Since the start of this competition, Kong Zhendong feels that he is a little high-profile, as a sparring partner, he always does the work of the head coach, although there are Zhang Xilin and Mi Xingbang, two discerning elders, behind the back, but it is estimated that this has filled other hatreds in the men's and women's teams.

Today he is going to keep a low profile and just be a lucky general of Coach Zhang Xilin.

Qiao Hong's game, in Kong Zhendong's opinion, is very easy.

After all, Chen Yuhe and Li Fengji fought hard for five games yesterday, which consumed too much physical energy of Li Fengji.

Coupled with the backward medical conditions in the Northern Dynasties, the degree of injury and illness of athletes is much stronger than that of China.

Kong Zhendong also heard that Li Fengji's real age is much older than the age of the competition, which has no evidence, but it can be used as a proof that her state is decaying faster than her age.

Li Fengji, who is old, in a sluggish state, and has serious physical exertion, should be very good at fighting.

But Kong Zhendong looked at the other women's team coaches around him, all of them looked nervous like facing a big enemy, and Kong Zhendong began to slowly understand the terrifying pressure of the first rival of women's table tennis in the 80s.

Coach Zhang Xilin said: "We attach importance to Li Fengji, and we also have data to speak. Looking through the foreign war records of the Chinese women's team in the 80s, Li Fengji has the highest winning rate for Chinese players. The seeded players in our competition have all had the experience of being pulled down by Li Fengji in the knockout round. Therefore, the women's team will take Li Fengji's results as the first prerequisite for the team's selection for a period of time. Of course, in recent years, we have considered more comprehensively, Xuan Jinghe, Chen Jing, and Xiaoshan Lili are all important opponents for us, but we still put Li Fengji, who has the most restrained style of play, in the first place. ”

Kong Zhendong nodded, he fully understood the cautiousness, or fear, that the women's team had formed for Li Fengji over the years. He only hoped that this tense atmosphere would not affect Qiao Hong's performance.

At the beginning of the game, Li Fengji was indeed in a weak state and physical fitness today, but the surprisingly strong willpower of the Northern Korean athlete supported her to maintain the initiative in the first half of the first game.

Kong Zhendong sighed: "Qiao Hong's mentality is still disturbed by the tense atmosphere. Her form in the singles match this time has been adjusted to the peak, and she has not lost a single game in the three group games and the last round of knockout rounds, and it is not an exaggeration to say that she is like a rainbow. This breath really can't be stopped. ”

If it was a few days ago, Kong Zhendong would have stood up and shouted loudly to cheer Qiao Hong up, but today he still chose to give advice to Zhang Xilin, and decided that Zhang Xilin would do it.

At present, although Li Fengji has the advantage at the beginning of the first game, Zhang Xilin instructed Qiao Hong to carry out psychological counseling and tactical arrangements after the end of the first game. However, Kong Zhendong's words reminded him that although he felt that there was nothing wrong with encountering a fierce opponent like Li Fengji, there was nothing wrong with temporarily avoiding the edge in the first game of the five-game game, but Qiao Hong's momentum was very important.

Once the momentum is completely suppressed, Li Fengji may become more and more excited as she grows, and the bottleneck of physical fitness will gradually forget.

Zhang Xilin rarely shouted on the field: "Dahong, press up, be ruthless!" ”

With the instructions of the head coach, Qiao Hong, who was originally going to play with Li Fengji in the first game and consumed physical energy, immediately followed the coach's instructions, actively pressed on, and fought with Li Fengji fiercely for every board.

This style of playing the first game as a tiebreaker was much more than Li Fengji and the Northern Dynasty coaching staff expected.

The steady Qiao Hong has never had such a first game without returning!

Ill-prepared, Li Fengji lost the first game.

Li Fengji's physical fitness and state are on the verge of collapse, and what supports her is just a momentum.

Qiao Hong fought the first game, and he also took away Li Fengji's momentum and tenacity.

In the next two games, Li Fengji made the most stubborn resistance in her will, but in the game, she has not been able to take the initiative.

With a score of 3:0, Qiao Hong defeated Li Fengji, who was considered the strongest opponent by the Chinese team before the game.

At ten o'clock in the morning, another semi-final of national attention, which is also Asian attention, was produced between Deng Yalin and Xuan Jinghe.

Kong Zhendong believes that the difficulty of this game is much greater than most people think.

Kong Zhendong's later generations occasionally used the Internet to understand the evaluation of ordinary fans of the world's top masters.

He found that the vast majority of fans put the table tennis Grand Slam in the supreme position.

This perception is neither true nor true.

If you compare a number of top players in the same period, it can be understood that there is a difference in strength between the Grand Slam and the athletes who won some of them.

Some people will give a counterexample, saying that XXX did not win the Grand Slam, but in fact, the strength is too great, but the schedule of the major tournament is tight, the running is insufficient, or the mentality is fragile at the critical moment of the tournament that there is no Grand Slam, in fact, the strength of the Grand Slam players is no different, or even stronger.

This is bandit logic, isn't it a weakness that your skills can't win in a dense schedule? Isn't it part of your strength to collapse too easily in the new competition?

Therefore, among the table tennis players of almost the same era, whether or not they win the Grand Slam can be used as an important indicator to measure the strength or weakness.

However, this indicator is not fully applicable when measuring the strength of female players.

Because the format of the women's international competition has always been incomplete.

Kong Zhendong remembers that Deng Yalin met the first Women's World Cup champion in 96 years before retiring.

Thus, she became the first women's Grand Slam. Just imagine, if the Women's World Cup was born a year later, it would be as strong as Deng Yalin, and it would not be a Grand Slam player.

Therefore, the women's masters who retired before 96 cannot think that they must be weak just because the opponent did not participate in the World Cup and did not have a Grand Slam.

At a time when table tennis is only entering the Olympics for the second time and the World Cup is still far away, the only measure of a woman's table tennis dominance is the World Championships.

Before today's match, Xuan Jinghe had already won the World Championships Women's Doubles Championship, Mixed Doubles Championship, and Women's Team Championship, and was only one step away from the World Championships Grand Slam.

Deng Yalin only has the women's doubles championship, the women's singles championship, and the rout of the women's team at the Chiba World Table Tennis Championships, which caused Deng Yalin's international competition results at this time to be weaker than Xuan Jinghe.

Therefore, the two of them, whoever can win the women's singles gold medal in this Olympic Games will truly reach the pinnacle of women's table tennis and become the queen of table tennis.

At least in 92, Xuan Jinghe was a strong opponent with the same strength as Deng Yalin.