San Francisco celebrates pingpong with Chinatown tournament

Ranging from one-day Olympic hopefuls to the ultra-novices, scores of competitors grabbed their paddles and headed Sunday to San Francisco’s Chinatown, where they faced off among a clatter of whizzing balls in the neighborhood’s ever-popular annual pingpong tournament.

The crowded contest, held at four locations around Chinatown, is a testament to the sport’s growing popularity among nearly every demographic in the United States and its continued dominance in China, a country that swept all four of the sport’s gold medals at the Rio Olympic Games.

“It’s very addictive,” said William Luk, as he got ready to compete Sunday morning with other players in a packed recreation center at Willie “Woo Woo” Wong Playground. “It gets you sweating like crazy. You stay fit and you stay young.”

The crescendo of pop-pop-popping balls rang out among the grids of ultramarine-blue tables as games began at the rec center and down the street at the Hilton Hotel ballroom.

Other matches were held at tournament sites at Jean Parker and Gordon J. Lau elementary schools, where players on some 52 teams packed in shoulder-to-shoulder and rivals swung wildly, some diving, at the speeding, nearly invisible, inch-and-a-half-wide balls.

Mayor Ed Lee christened the sixth annual San Francisco Chinatown Ping Pong Festival earlier in the morning as city bigwigs like state Assemblyman David Chiu and Chinatown power broker Rose Pak addressed an exuberant crowd at Portsmouth Square.

“When I was a little kid, my father taught me pingpong,” Chiu said while standing at the podium Sunday with his newborn son strapped to his chest. “It’s how we bonded after work. Today is about the San Francisco family coming together.”

After a brief round of speeches, Lee grabbed a paddle himself and took several challengers to school in heads-up rallies, including interim Police Chief Toney Chaplin and Central Station Capt. David Lazar.

Lee helped organize the event to commemorate the anniversary of pingpong diplomacy introduced by President Richard Nixon in the early 1970s to open up relations between China and the United States.

That symbolism wasn’t lost on Sunday’s crowd as Lee continues to navigate the city’s precarious political waters amid soaring housing prices and increased tensions between police and some communities.

“This is really a community-based event,” Lee said to the supportive Chinatown crowd. “We’re inviting kids of all ages, men and women and our seniors to come play out here.”

Youngest of the challengers — at least among the elite players competing in the grand ballroom at the Hilton — was 11-year-old Emilie Yin.

The table tennis phenom rode up from San Jose where she trains almost every day and is used to shocking opponents with her prodigious pingpong prowess.

“One day I hope to get to the Olympics,” Emilie said, taking a break between games on the same day the 2016 Olympics were wrapping up more than 6,000 miles away in Rio de Janeiro. “That way everyone can know America is getting a lot better.”

But it may take the focus of players like Emilie for the United States to make a mark on the game that is more-or-less a national sport in many Asian countries. China has won 28 of 32 gold medals since table tennis was introduced as an Olympic sport in 1988.

The United States, meanwhile, got skunked this year in Rio. Yelena Karshtedt, who was at the Games in Brazil working as a table tennis umpire, was back in the Bay Area to help out with Sunday’s event.

“The U.S. in general does not play well on an Olympic level, but they’re getting better,” she said.

And while many of the people packed into gyms and rec centers in Chinatown on Sunday may never go on to compete seriously, they represent the groundswell that could go on to produce the first American medalist.

“It is our hope that this will train the next generation to one day win gold at the Olympics,” Chiu said.