Jan-Ove Waldner is one of Sweden’s greatest athletes.
But it could have gone completely differently for our hero.
He was a great talent in another sport – which he ultimately opted out of.
There is no one like Jan-Ove Waldner. There are Swedish athletes who have made their mark in sports that have traditionally been bigger, but there is no one who has been as dominant and as elegant as JO was when he stood at a table tennis table.
One of our biggest
Jan-Ove Waldner is known as the man who broke the incredible Chinese dominance, and for that he will always be an icon there as well. In China, he goes by the name “The Evergreen Tree” (Cháng Qīng Shù) or “Old Wa” (Lǎo Wǎ), and that says a lot about his enormous greatness.
Waldner is one of Sweden’s greatest athletes of all time, but the fact is that it could actually have been a different sport than table tennis. In connection with the fact that he, together with his friends in the national team, won the Bragdguldet in 1989, he revealed that it was not obvious that it would be table tennis. JO has always been known as a ball genius and a natural, so it’s not really surprising.
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Talent in other sports
But the fact is that JO was a talent in as many as three sports, and it wasn’t until his late teens that he chose table tennis.
– It was a long time between tennis, table tennis and football. In the end just between tennis and table tennis. But it became, at the age of 15, an easy choice, too. The tennis, especially on clay, was far too boring.
In the same interview, Waldner also revealed his interests outside of table tennis – and his idols.
– I always seek out the arenas with the lyres. Hammarby has always been my team, in football there is an Argentine called Maradona, tennis has McEnroe and ice hockey Wayne Gretzky.
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