At the English Institute of Sport in Sheffield, UK, athletes from many different disciplines are training for the 2012 Olympics in London. The state of the art sports centre was built in 2003 to host eight national sports associations by providing the necessary facilities needed to prepare the sportsmen to compete at the highest level. However the facilities are only part of the equation for success and many of the sports associations are also looking at China’s recent Olympic achievement to find clues as to how best to coach their most promising team members.

Alan Cooke, Women’s Head Table Tennis Coach for Team GB explains,

China plays an influence throughout the world of table tennis it is obviously by far the strongest nation in table tennis at this moment in time so the rest of the world is playing catch-up to them. We try to spend a lot of time out there. There are lot of strong provinces and clubs where we can train, there is a lot of options for us and it’s a great experience for our girls to go out there and see how hard and how professional all the players are out in China. Obviously we can’ be out there all the time but we try to bring back what we have learnt from there and to use what we feel we can use in this environment.

The men’s table tennis team has gone one step further by hiring Chinese coach Jia Yi Liu to prepare the best UK players. I asked British number one Paul Drinkall how much the Chinese influence his training,

I think to be honest the Chinese influence everybody in Table tennis. When you go to the tournaments when you see them playing even the top players ranked three four five in the world they are all watching the Chinese trying to learn from them…So for me and everyone else here Chinese table tennis has influenced us a lot and our Chinese coach Jia has helped a lot trying to give us a Chinese style and he’s organized quite a few trips out to China so we’e been able to train with the Chinese players and things like that have all helped us to get to where we are now and hopefully in 2012 we will be fighting against the Chinese.

Next door at the World Snooker Academy and throughout the institute more and more Chinese players and coaches are spending time in Sheffield.

If China really put its mind to achieving a high level in any particular sport and put resources into that it can happen what’s happened in table tennis. They can dominate the world and we are all playing catch up.