Gao, U.S. Table Tennis Teammates Practice For Olympics

August 4, 2008 8:43 a.m. EST

Washington, DC (AHN) - Gao Jun is among the few Chinese players on the U.S. national team who are banking on a share of medals in the table tennis event in next week's Beijing Olympics.

Not coincidentally, Gao and the rest of the field are in China to prep for the big competition, fitting enough for a country where the sport is iconic.

The 39-year-old Gao sure knows the ins and outs of training in Beijing, especially with seemingly insurmountable odds before her and her teammates.

The U.S. national team has four members, all from China.

Like Gao, Crystal Huang, Wang Chen and the only men's player David Zhuang are nowhere in North America, where the sport more locally known here as ping-pong is taking a slow, grinding climb to popularity.

It all pales to comparison in Beijing, that is why Gao is taking his pair of paddles to her native homeland.

"If I want to play good, I have to go to China to train," Gao told the Washington Post. "In U.S., nobody was training with me. Nobody practiced with me. In the U.S., there's not many good players. We have some, but we don't live together, so it's very hard for us to train in the U.S."

Gao, ranked 25th in the world, had been there before-winning the silver in the doubles event in 1992-although she admitted her Chinese foes have become much stronger over the years.

She backed off from the sport's limelight after Barcelona for several years but renewed her craze for the sport when she became a U.S. citizen. In 1997, Gao was back in front of the table once again.

Gao, who helped the U.S. reach its best showing since 1989 with a 12th-place finish at the World Championships, trains at Shanghai University and is focused on giving her career another shot in the arm.

"I want to get a medal. But it's hard. If you think you have no chance to get a medal, your performance will suffer," she told AFP.