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London's table tennis runner-up Ding has easy win to open Rio Olympics

Xinhua, August 8, 2016 Adjust font size:

World No. 2 Ding Ning kicked off China's defending campaign on table tennis in Rio Olympics Sunday with a comfortable victory in women's singles.

The 26-year-old top seed overcame a mid-way thriller, coming back from 6-0 behind in the second set to win 11-5, 11-8, 11-5, 11-2 over Romania's world No. 29 Elizabeth Samara in 22 minutes, with a playing duration of just 11 minutes.

"I'm a little bit nervous since it's my opening game," said Ding, who lost to fellow Chinese Li Xiaoxia in singles final of London 2012.

"But I'm quite satisfied with my following performance, especially that I kept calm when my opponent caught a double of edge balls to improve from 4-0 to 6-0.

"I think I've prepared well when the match went deep in favor of me. And I've also prepared well to face any unexpected situations since anything is possible on court," said Ding, referring to her breakdown after being penalized on serving four years ago in the Olympics final.

"What you can do is just to be at your very best and prepared to face anything with a positive mood," added the 2011 and 2015 world champion. "For myself, what comfort me most is that I'm a much more mature player now than four years ago."

Kong Linghui, head coach of the Chinese women's team, gave a thumb-up to Ding's performance, saying that she's been doing well upon the pressure of coming out as the first Chinese.

"I'm beyond satisfied with Ding's match. It's always hard to cope with the atmosphere of the very first match, especially on a court as the Olympic Games," said Kong, a former Grand Slam winner of world championships, World Cup and Olympic Games.

"We coaches helped last evening to prepare her match against Samara, who played Ding twice in the past four years.

"Mentally, Ding's quite upbeat today, which paved the way of her good performance," added Kong.

Ding will next play Doo Hoi Kem of Hong Kong, China in the fourth round after the latter ousted Georgina Pota of Hungary 4-2 on Sunday evening.

Another Sunday's match played by a Chinese player is from the world No. 1 male paddler Ma Long and his third round rival Jonathan Groth of Denmark. Endit