Nearly 40 years after retiring from pro table tennis, Zhiying Zeng of Chile made her Olympic debut in the sport at 58 years old.
Zhiying Zeng was born in 1966 to a mom who coached table tennis. She picked up a paddle as soon as she could hold it, joined a junior elite team at a military sports school in Beijing at age 11, and turned pro at age 12. And like most other young athletes, she had aspirations to make the Games: “It was the biggest dream of my life,” she told CNN Sport. “Even when I was a little girl and they would ask me what my dream was, I would say: ‘Become an Olympian.
She started playing again, briefly, in 2003 because she thought her 13-year-old son was playing too many video games and wanted to introduce him to something more active. The strategy worked—her son developed his own passion for table tennis—and Zeng still had skills, winning a few tournaments. But she stopped again when her son was old enough to train on his own. For the next 20 years, she focused mainly on running her furniture store in Iquique, a town in northern Chile.
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