Deng Yaping

Deng Yaping was born in Zhengzhou, in Henan province, and was taught table tennis by her father, a coach, from the age of five. She was good very early and very small. At nine she was turned away from the provincial team on the grounds that she would never be tall enough to reach across the table. At 13 she won a national championship and was still refused a place in the national team for the same reason.

Her father and coaches worked around it. Because she could not rely on reach, she built a game on speed and aggression, standing close to the table and attacking every ball. In 1988 the selectors relented. Within three years she was world champion.

At the 1992 Olympics in Barcelona she won both the singles and the doubles, and in Atlanta in 1996 she did the same again. She was ranked number one in the world for eight consecutive years and won 18 world titles before retiring in 1997 at 24, worn down by injuries.

She had spent her childhood training rather than in school, and could barely read English. She started again from scratch, studying at Tsinghua University in Beijing, then in Nottingham, and finally at Cambridge, where she completed a doctorate in land economy in 2008. She served on the International Olympic Committee's athletes' commission and helped organise the Beijing Olympics.