Author Topic: 'Ping pong is coming home'  (Read 1426 times)

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Offline bijou

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'Ping pong is coming home'
« on: August 25, 2008, 10:02:57 AM »
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LONDON Mayor Boris Johnson received the Olympic baton in typically flamboyant style - telling the Chinese “ping pong is coming home”.
At a party in Beijing to celebrate the handover of the Olympics to London ahead of the 2012 Games last night, Mr Johnson told the assembled Team GB athletes and officials that Britain invented the game beloved of the Chinese.

Its origins, he told the crowd, lay in the dining rooms of Victorian England when the game was known as “whiff whaff”.

He said: “I say this respectfully to our Chinese hosts who have excelled so magnificently at ping pong.

“Ping pong was invented on the dining tables of England in the 19th century and it was called whiff whaff.

“That is the essential difference between us and the rest of the world.


“Other nations - the French - looked at a dining table and saw an opportunity to have dinner.

“We looked at a dining table and saw an opportunity to play whiff whaff.

“That is why London is the sporting capital of the world.

“And I say to the Chinese, and I say to the world: Ping pong is coming home, athletics is coming home, sport is coming home.”


Mr Johnson said ”virtually every single one“ of the modern Olympic sports was ”either invented or codified by the British“.

But he said he “mourned the passing” of the Ancient Greek pankration event “whose chief exponent was Milo of Croton, whose signature performance involved carrying an ox the length of the stadium, killing it with his bare hands and then eating it on the same day.”

He joked he was trying to persuade London Olympic chiefs to bring it back for 2012.

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http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/article1603833.ece

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This is why I like Mayor Johnson, his absolute refusal to go along with the po faced one world IOC tripe. So many people have been whining about him not taking it seriously but what an antidote to Beijing.