[IELTS相关] Table tennis tenderfoot paddles prodigy's public image 14-love 分类: IELTS相关; 查看: 648 次; 回复: 0 次

Ping pong prodigy Ai Fukuhara has a rival on the scene and she's not too happy about it, according to Asahi Geino (5/24).

Ai has been the face of Japanese table tennis for more than a decade after her parents started shoving her in front of TV cameras playing ping pong from the time she was barely big enough to walk, let alone see the top of the table.

But the emergence of 14-year-old Kasumi Ishikawa to become the youngest ever member of a national table tennis team has put Ai in a rather tight spot.

Much has been made of the Fukuhara-Ishikawa rivalry, and during the recent national team camp in the lead-up to next week's world championships in Croatia, over 70 reporters gathered to cover their first singles clash, even though it was nothing more than a practice match.
"Ichikawa is being called Ai the Second. She's had a table at home since she was a toddler and her parents have put her through table tennis programs for gifted kids," a newscaster for a private TV network's sports program tells Asahi Geino. "Ichikawa's first match against Ai, who was a wunderkind herself, was all anybody was talking about."

Though the match may have been eagerly awaited by many, nobody told Ai that it was going to happen. She wasn't too happy when she went in to play the practice match and saw the media scrum waiting for her. She ended up rushing off to the toilet and holed up there for quite some time, delaying the planned start of the game.

Ishikawa was apparently said to have complained that the longer-than-expected wait made her nervous. If that was the case, it didn't show at the table, where the 14-year-old took the first set. Ai recovered, however, and won the remaining two sets to take out the match.

National women's table tennis team coach Kinji Kondo says he deliberately picked the prickly opponent to test Ai.

"I was thinking about who would be the best person to play Ai, and realized Ishikawa would put her under the most pressure," he says.

A national table tennis association insider say the grudge match between the child geniuses was a matter of pride for Ai.

"Ai hates losing more than anyone. And she especially hates going down to a player younger than she is. She's grown up enough to stop crying in public, but when she does lose, she shuts herself up in the toilet or changing room for hours and bawls. That's how much she expects to win," the insider tells Asahi Geino. "As the coach says, though, Ai does have a tendency to buckle under pressure. She's done well in international competition, but in Japan she still hasn't managed to dominate the competition as you'd expect her to have done. The match against Ishikawa would have given her a good shake-up in the lead-up to the world champs."

Despite Ishikawa sweeping onto the scene, nobody doubts that Ai is the ace of the national team. But some suggest she's gone as far as she can.

"Frankly speaking, there's a limit to how far prodigy players can go. It's a bit early to say that Fukuhara has reached her limit, especially as she's the face of Japanese table tennis," a sports newspaper reporter tells Asahi Geino. "But she might lose the title of 'team ace' unless she starts exerting some sort of dominance over the national titles.