Lily Zhang made history with the first U.S. table tennis medal after 1959

(LR) Lin Gaoyuan (China) and Lily Zhang will compete against Emmanuel Lebesson and Jia Nan Yuan (France) in the semi-finals of the mixed doubles at the 2021 ITTF World Table Tennis Championships on November 27, 2021 in Houston.

Fifty years after the United States and China began as a “ping-pong diplomat,” table tennis players from both countries came together to form a pair of mixed doubles teams to compete in the final of the 2021 World Table Tennis Championships in Houston.

One of those teams – American Lily Zhang and Chinese Lin Gaoyuan – made it to the semifinals on Sunday at the George R. Brown Convention Center.

Despite 2-0, Zhang and Gaoyuan leveled the match in two games before dropping the decisive game to the Japanese Tomokazu Harimoto and Hina Hayata. The Japanese duo’s 3-2 victory ended at 11-9, 11-1, 6-11, 8-11, 11-2.

Despite the defeat, Zhang and Gaoyuan earned a bronze medal for their efforts. Zhang’s is the first table tennis world medal awarded to an American in 62 years. The last was the men’s singles bronze medal collected by Dick Miles in 1959.

The second player to make history was Kanak Jha, who became the first American to advance to the men’s singles semifinals at the 1959 World Championships. Jha and Wang Manyu formed the second mixed doubles team between the United States and China. They reached the 16th semi-finals by dropping 3-2 to India’s Sathiya Gnanasekaran and Manika Batra (15-17, 10-12, 12-10, 11-6, 11-7).

Harimoto and Hayata will face Chinese Wang Chuqin and Sun Yingshan in a gold medal match scheduled to play late Sunday.

Zhang and Gaoyuan had made it to the medal round, winning the quarterfinals by Frenchman Emmanuel Lebesson and Yuan Jia Nan duo 11-9, 9-11, 11-7, 11-7.

The Zhang-Gaoyuan and Jha-Manyu couples returned to a U.S.-China diplomatic initiative that began long before the birth of either. It started at the 1971 World Table Tennis Championships in Nagoya, Japan.

Zhang, whose parents were born in China, has come a long way with sports since he started playing at the laundry room table. The 25-year-old has been a three-time Olympic winner, a Pan American Games gold medalist and a five-time U.S. champion.