Women beating men in top divisions

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The Chinese Women's team recently crushed the U.S. Men's team 4-1 and Juan Liu just won the last two Westchester Opens, beating Jiwei Xu and Daniel Gorak in the process.

Are these unusual times, or historically, have top women often beaten top men?
 
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The Chinese are just really, really good at table tennis. Nothing new. Zhang Yining beat Lucjan Błaszczyk (a top 50 player at the time).

This is true. The Chinese are just that far ahead of everyone else. Back in the 90s on the CNT, the top guys would spot the best women 7 in a game to 21. Now the men spot the women 3-6 depending on who is playing. One thing about the CNT women players is that they find holes in people's games and drive mack trucks through them. It is not surprising that the top CNT women beat the US men's team or occasionally beat a guy in the top 50. Beating a male CNT player is another story altogether though.
 
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The Chinese Women's team recently crushed the U.S. Men's team 4-1 and Juan Liu just won the last two Westchester Opens, beating Jiwei Xu and Daniel Gorak in the process.

Are these unusual times, or historically, have top women often beaten top men?
As far as I can see, the Chinese women beating the US men is not a case of top women beating top men. The US men are not in the first level of excellence. Yes, they are very, very good table tennis players, but they are not "top". And it has always been the case that the best women will beat second string men. Plus, we all know this from our own local experience. Any club which has really good women players will have lots of examples of those women taking men to the cleaners. Over the last ten years, one of the clubs I've played at has consistently had teenage girls as their highest rated players.
 
says Aging is a killer
Happens in most sports

In most sports, drop below professional level and women become competitive. The reason we don't see it more often is that, by and large, women don't participate in sport in nearly as great a number as men. But it is changing.

In TT, a big contributory to top Chinese women initial wins is that the men just don't see the womens' up to the table hard hitting style very often.
I've seen it twice in the UK. Ex-CNT female comes beats all the men. Except there's always one player that beats her, then the rest say, "Aah, so that's how it's done".
I've seen CNT women lose to comparatively low level Europeans. Like in most TT matches, there's a lot of factors to each individual situation.
 
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"Aah, so that's how it's done". How was that? Can you be more specific?[/QUOTE

Basically he combined tight serves with very spinny topspin causing her to make loads of mistakes.
In other words, women players are not used to the heavy topspin that men can generate.
This was pre-plastic ball days.

I couldn't find the particular match, the male player's name was Michael Marsden.
 
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"Aah, so that's how it's done". How was that? Can you be more specific?[/QUOTE

Basically he combined tight serves with very spinny topspin causing her to make loads of mistakes.
In other words, women players are not used to the heavy topspin that men can generate.
This was pre-plastic ball days.

I couldn't find the particular match, the male player's name was Michael Marsden.

He has a YouTube channel, maybe you can find it.

https://youtu.be/PxPA5GgwK2I
 
says Aging is a killer
Very difficult to put numbers to it. Every match-up has all sorts of influences. However, assume that women were allowed to enter ITTF competition, my expectation is that it would be rare for any to get into the last 16.
Put another way, I don't think that most leagues have a specific restriction on female players. Maybe some pro leagues do. Here in the UK there's none and women play from time to time. I know that Tin Tin played in the second tier with a decent average of about 60%.
The biggest complaint from the women is that they can breathe in only so much testosterone. It becomes oppressive very quickly:cool:
 
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Speculations are just that.

In the distant past, women had a separate competition and were prohibited from playing in the mens in my region.

This has changed (although there still is a women only competition). It changed after one woman player fought for dispensation, managed to get it temporarily at first, and then played nearly 100% in her first season. After that, the injunction was lifted and more women followed suit.

We have far fewer women players now, both in absolute terms (by far) and as a percentage of the total head count. But the mixed, formerly men only, competition still has the top females too.

And I think they are not as far below the top as the relative numbers would suggest.
 
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This thread got put up top for some reason but I don't see a recent post. I am guessing it was a bot post, but it's still an interesting topic. I thought some of the anecdotes mentioned here are odd. Liu Juan is a former CNT women's team member whose game has aged well, saying she beat Daniel Gorak and Jiwei Xu doesn't mean much because they are not really comparable men relative to her level on the women's side at all.

Also, CNT women as a whole cannot compete with the top 30 men in the world as one user mentioned. Maybe the best of the best can, and that depends on how loosely or tightly you define "compete", but, the most CNT women's players would surely not be favored against a lot of "true ranking" top 150 or so men, barring some crazy style matchup.

But again, it really comes down to how much better the Chinese are than the rest of the world. Especially on the women's side. If you took pretty much any female player from the national team, or the Superleague or Jia A, they would whoop almost all of the top non-Chinese players.
 
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