‘Auntie’ Ni, 61, beams as she bows out to Olympic table tennis champion

Did you hear the one about the 61-year-old grandmother who beat the world’s best table tennis player? Well, she didn’t. Not quite. On Monday, Luxembourg’s Ni Xia Lian, who was born on 4 July 1963, became the oldest competitor in the history of the Olympics to win a table tennis match when she beat the 31-year-old Turkish player Sibel Altinkaya. On Wednesday, she became the oldest player in the history of the Olympics to lose one, too, when she was beaten by the Chinese world and Olympic silver medallist Sun Yingsha. Sun, 23, who is the world No 1 and won team gold in Tokyo, isn’t just 38 years younger than Ni, she’s nine years younger than her son, too.

Sun won in straight games, 4-0, but when it was all over, it was Ni who got the standing ovation from the happy crowd and a hug from the Grand Duke of Luxembourg, and who had to stay on long after the session was over and the stands had emptied out to talk to all the different TV crews and news journalists who wanted to tell her story. She is a remarkable woman, all sweetness and smiles until she steps up to the table. She says the athlete at the Games she most wants to share a cup of coffee with is her husband, Tommy Danielsson, who used to compete for Sweden, and that her hobby is “making her home beautiful”. Along with destroying players half her age.

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Ni took up table tennis when she was a little girl in Shanghai, after watching a tournament on TV. By the time she was 16 she was on the national team and in 1983 she won two gold medals for China at the world championships in Berlin. She liked the city so much that she moved to study in Germany soon after, and then she ended up moving to Luxembourg after she had graduated and has lived there ever since. The technique she learned as a little girl has served her all her life. This was her sixth Olympics, and Luxembourg chose her to carry the flag for their team in the opening ceremony.

Ni is well known in Luxembourg, and utterly beloved in China. The younger players on the circuit all call her “Auntie” as a sign of respect. But she admitted that she was a little nervous about taking on Sun. “I was one of the best in the world too,” she said afterwards, “but that was 40 years ago!” She nearly took the third game with a couple of stunning backhands, but in the end lost it 13-11. “I was worried if I was good enough, but if you never play, you’ll never know,” she said. And if she’s not as fast or powerful as the athletes she’s up against, she is as shrewd as any of them.

After all, Ni is eight days older than the head coach of the Chinese national team. She hardly moves her feet but always seems to be in the right position anyway. She plays with a left-handed pen grip, and puts all kinds of wicked spin on the ball, making it whip and dip and spurt and curve. “My style is old fashioned, but my technique is advanced,” she said, “you can always change what you do, always improve. I hope we showed the world that any age can play and that any kind of people can play.”

She has already inspired at least one other athlete here. Her former Chinese teammate, Zhiying Zeng, has just come back to the sport after three decades out of it. Zeng, who now lives in Chile and works in the furniture business, took it up again during the pandemic as a way to get a little more exercise and make a few friends. But soon enough her muscle memory kicked in and she started to dream about trying to qualify for the national team. She was studying some of the international competition online and happened to see Ni’s familiar face among them.

The two women had been on the national team together in the 1980s. “When I started playing last year, Ni was already 60 years old,” said Zeng, who is 58. “If she can play, then I can also improve my physical fitness and play. She’s a role model for me to follow.” Zeng lost in the first round, but as Ni has just shown, there’s no reason why she can’t try and qualify again for Los Angeles in 2028. Ni isn’t ruling it out herself. “Who knows?” she said, “The gods will say! Recently I thought I was maybe too old to play, but after that I stopped to think: ‘No that’s not right, you are being silly,’ because as I always say: ‘I’m always younger today than I will be tomorrow.’”