When it comes to competitive table tennis, Dr Yaping Deng holds an impressive record: between 1988 and 1997, she won 18 world championships, and is now considered one of the greatest players in the history of the sport. Having won Gold in both singles and doubles tournaments at her first Olympic Games in 1992, she then repeated the achievement at the Atlanta Olympics in 1996. At the age of 24, she retired from professional sport, and was voted Chinese Sports Personality of the Century two years later.
But instead of remaining in China and basking in her fame, Yaping decided to embrace a new challenge and move to the UK to study. Today, having completed a Masters at Nottingham University and a PhD in Land Economy at the University of Cambridge, Yaping spends most of her time working with the Deng Yaping Sports Investment Fund, which she set in 2016 up to develop the sports industry in China. Just a few years earlier, she wasn’t able to recite all 26 letters of the English alphabet.
Herminia Ibarra, Charles Handy Professor of Organisational Behaviour, says Yaping is a “role model” for anyone wanting to make a career pivot – something that is becoming much more common but isn’t always easy to achieve.
Hermina Ibarra: Yaping, you’re an amazing athlete and one of the greatest table tennis players in the history of the sport. After your table tennis career, you didn’t do the usual thing and become a coach. You went on to become an academic. And you didn’t stop there. Can we kick off by you telling us a little bit about your sports career?
Yaping Deng: I started playing ping pong when I was five-years-old. My father was my coach and he was a national champion in China, so it was a family matter. I was quite short, so I had to stand on a wooden box to reach the table – but I gradually began to show some talent and was invited to play in the provincial team on a trial period. But, not long after that, the coach asked my father to take me home. I wasn’t told why, and I couldn’t understand it. I could beat most of the other players in the team. Later on, I found out from my father that the reason was my height.
They thought I’d be too short to play in the national team and have a future career in table tennis. But I continued to train with my father because I was determined to prove them wrong. The conditions were so bad: this was the 1980s in China. In winter, it was freezing with no heating, and in summer, I trained in 40-degree heat with no air conditioning. But I had a dream: I wanted to win a world championship. So, the poor conditions didn’t matter to me. I wanted to win.