PAST: Eric Hamber Griffins
PRESENT: Bridgeport Sports Club
FUTURE: Student Club McMaster UniversityĚý
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Michelle Liaw has risen to the top ranks of Canadian table tennis by pursuing a game of slow destruction. She is the relentless drop of water that erodes her opponents’ resolve, wearing them away until they break.
“Instead of winning the point as quickly as possible, she likes to play the point a bit longer outlast her opponent,” said Andre Ho, a 22-year-old Olympian and Liaw’s coach at the Bridgeport Sports Club in Richmond. “This is an ability not everyone has and with her, she can play fast but she can change it up if she has to. It’s a distinction compared to most girls her age.”
Liaw, 17, ranked second in the country for her age and in the top five of all Canadian women, adds a strong backhand to her stamina, resolve and ability to create variations on spin and speed — all while staying stable and forcing her competitor into an extended rapid-fire exchange.
Sponsored by CIBC and Stiga, a clothing and paddle company, Liaw is one of the country’s strongest contenders for the 2016 Rio Olympic Games and will start on that path by aiming for a medal at the 2015 Toronto Pan Am Games. She enrolled at McMaster University because of the school’s recreational table tennis club and will continue to train under national women’s coach Junya Chan.
For three years beginning at age six, Vancouver-born Liaw developed her table tennis skills in China, the country that manufactures the most world champions and Olympians in the sport. It wasn’t easy. “They knew I’m Chinese but not from China, so they treated me a different way,” she said.
Her peers there specialized in the sport at the cost of their education. “They play full time and they don’t go to school,” Liaw remembered. “It would help me improve if I played full time, but I think education is also important.”
Her father insisted she play a net sport and her mother wanted Laiw to identify with her Chinese heritage, so she lived with her maternal grandparents and now speaks Cantonese and Mandarin. (She also plays the 21-string gu zheng.)
But because of her relative limited experience with table tennis she was shown-up by younger talents and made to feel inadequate. She also described the coaches’ “harsh” treatment, punishments she saw inflected on other students but from which she was spared. Liaw turned the difficult experience to her advantage.
“It motivated me to train even harder and be the best in Canada,” she said. “When I play table tennis, I can forget about everything else. It’s something I really enjoy.”
Her coach Ho described Liaw as a “fighter,” but away from competition she isn’t known for her intensity. “She’s not exactly the one who talks a lot,” he said. “She’s very shy on the outside but she’s also very fiery on the inside.”
At Hamber secondary where Liaw led the Griffins to the 2013 B.C. table tennis championship, the future kinesiologist student is known as modest and even mild, said athletic director Inderpal Sehmbi.
“She doesn’t talk about her success. She’s soft-spoken but when you see her play table tennis, she changes into this fierce competitor. She just comes alive,” he said. “She is the kind of kid who doesn’t get a lot of recognition but she’s playing at the highest level. As someone who is o driven, she doesn’t need to tell people what she’s done. She knows how good she is and she knows where she wants to go.”
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