They’ve produced an NBA all star. Their soccer players have cracked the English Premier League. Now the search is on for the next Roger Federer.
As China grooms its male athletes to compete at the elite level in sports traditionally dominated by the West, the next frontier is tennis.
While Chinese athletes are quickly branching beyond their mainstays such as table tennis, badminton and diving, tennis has been a laggard.
Although the Chinese women have shined in recent years, the male tennis players have struggled to match the success.
The big gap was evident as China prepares to host some of the region’s top players at the Asian Games in Guangzhou. With organizers unveiling the team competition draw yesterday, China was seeded first in the women’s draw, led by No. 11-ranked Li Na. By contrast, the men were seeded fifth behind Taiwan, Japan, Uzbekistan and India.
The highest-ranked man from China playing in Guangzhou is Zhang Ze, 308 on the ATP list.
Yet Chinese team officials and observers expect the imbalance to change soon, pointing to a pool of rising men’s talent.
In Guangzhou, Thailand’s Danai Udomchoke will be defending his men’s singles gold from Doha four years ago, but the favorites are Taiwan’s Lu Yen-hsun, now world No. 37, world No. 44 Denis Istomin of Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan’s Mikhail Kukushkin, who won his first title in St Petersburg last month.
On the women’s side, comeback queen Kimiko Date will seek a second Asian Games title 16 years after clinching gold on home soil in the Japanese city Hiroshima in 1994.
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