When the last world ranking of the year was presented on New Year's Eve, Ma Long was also missing. The now 36-year-old Chinese dominated the table tennis scene during the second half of the 2010s with two consecutive Olympic Games gold medals (2016 and 2021) and three consecutive World Championship gold medals in singles (2015, 2017, and 2019).
Critical of the rules
Earlier, Fan Zhendong, who won the Olympic Games in the summer on the men's side, and Chen Meng, Olympic Games winner in Paris on the women's side, have withdrawn from the world tour.
"Recently, WTT (World Table Tennis) issued a new rule that fines will be imposed if you do not participate. I am not willing to accept it, but I respect the international organizations, so the only thing I can do is to choose to withdraw," wrote Fan Zhendong on the social media platform Weibo.
WTT, which is a commercial company owned by the International Table Tennis Federation (ITTF), has however stated that the rules are not new for the 2025 season.
Beat Möregårdh
"We have not introduced any new rules, but we will review the existing ones in WTT as our athletes' voices are very important. We will have an extra board meeting in ITTF with representatives from WTT and intend to set up a group together with the athletes to work on the issue," writes Swedish Petra Sörling, who is the chairman of ITTF, in an SMS to SVT.
Fan Zhendong beat Truls Möregårdh – who is now seventh on the world ranking – in the Olympic Games final in Paris and in the World Championship final in 2021. Ma Long defeated Mattias Falck in the World Championship final in 2019.
