Lily Zhang and three teammates from the United States table tennis team were hanging out on a large boat last Friday, making small talk with the N.B.A. star Stephen Curry — as one does at an Olympic opening ceremony — when he asked what sport they played.
They told him, and his eyes lit up.
“Can I borrow you for a second?” Curry asked.
Moments later, the four table tennis players found themselves engaged in a brief but spirited debate with Curry and his teammate Anthony Edwards about whether Edwards, one of basketball’s brightest young talents, could notch a point against them on the table. The friendly trash talk was captured on camera and eventually watched by more than 15 million people online.
On one hand, the table tennis players said, it was one of those extraordinary, and extraordinarily funny, interactions that can happen only at the Olympics. On the other hand, they said, they have interactions like this all the time.
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Everywhere they go, the world’s best table tennis players meet strangers who believe they can hold their own against them. They tell them that they play “Ping-Pong,” too. They wonder aloud what the score would be, or even who would win. They suggest that they should play sometime.
This, alas, is the table tennis players’ cross to bear.
“You’ll meet someone, and their first reaction is, “I bet I can beat you, let’s play,’” Zhang said, laughing. “I don’t think you’d really say that to anyone in another sport. If you saw Michael Phelps, I don’t think you’d say, ‘I bet I can beat you in a race.’”
