The best advice for any situation: Close your eyes and pull like a dog
IT’S pornographic, so it is. Nothing short of pornographic, the way the Chinese tennis table players at the Olympics caress their little balls before banging them across the table to their opponent. (No sniggering down the back just because you have a dirty mind.)
It doesn’t help that it’s the only thing you can actually see, during any of their rounds, because all the other actions happen so quickly on such a tiny table that they might just as well have no ball at all. But before they let fly, they do this borderline sexual ritual with them, and at the same time — on the other side of the table — their competitor strokes their bat as if they were smoothing the fur on a cat. Extremely disturbing, it is. And before the Chinese embassy gets on to the Editor accusing me of racism, I’m not suggesting anything bad about one nationality. It’s just that I haven’t managed to catch any table-tennis players from any other country at this foreplay, perhaps because China is so dominant in the sport.
