What happens/happened to the WJTTChampions?

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So now the world junior championchips are in baharain. i am very interessted, because there are some player like koki niwa, that you now from tournements earlier this year.
so i took a look on wikipedia site, who has won the wjttc in past. i see names like ma long, patrick baum, ding ning, feng yalan. very famous now and everybody know them.
but there are a lot of names i dont know and i'm wondering why, because when they were the best of the juniors, why they arent on big tournements right now? (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Junior_Table_Tennis_Championships)

for example:

Mens: Li Hu (2003); Jeong Sang-Eun (2007); Chen Chien-An (2008)
Woman: Li Qian (2003); Chang Chenchen (2004); China Yang Yang (2007); Cao Lisi (2008)
and so on ...

so how can it be, that i know fang bo and song hongyuan and wu yang and zhu yuling (the lastest winner) but i never noticed some of the earlier winner (examples) ... because they had to be one of the best players now, or i'm wrong? so everbody knows patrick baum and he is german. so what happend to all these chinese players, which should be better? for example ma long and ding ning won this tournement and they are the best players at the moment?! i dont understand this :p
 
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Very interesting indeed. They are probably not good enough yet to represent their countries in the Pro Tour. Some of them break through, others don't. Compare it to tennis, where a lot of the Junior Wimbledon winners never achieve a real breakthrough in professional tennis.
 
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Very interesting indeed. They are probably not good enough yet to represent their countries in the Pro Tour. Some of them break through, others don't. Compare it to tennis, where a lot of the Junior Wimbledon winners never achieve a real breakthrough in professional tennis.

yea but thats an interesting fact. because they are young. they should become better and better. i mean, when they are 16, 17 years old, they are the best of the world. its like zhang jike becomes world champion and next year he is gone and a year later nobody knows him :D
 
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Jeong Sang Eun plays in korea a lot. He's been to other junior events. I've even seen him play on youtube in a pro tour event. Chen Chien An plays in the European league as he beat Schlager if I'm not mistaken. I'm not familiar with the other names however.

You also have to realize that winning the WJTTC doesn't always mean you're a top ranked player. I know a player who beat Waldner when he was in the swedish Junior events. He was two years older, but he never went pro because he didn't have the talent to continue plus he was 6' 8". A lot of womens cadets and juniors in the USA are ranked in the top 10 or have been at some time and we over all are less skilled than most of the Chinese pro players.

So just because a WJTTC winner is good enough to beat the cadets and juniors doesn't always mean they're good enough to go pro or that they even want to go pro. I know a lot of players who play in the U.S. who were trained in China and had a lot of potential but chose not to go pro.
 
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