How killing time at a laundromat set Lily Zhang on a path to multiple Olympics

By Don Riddell, CNN

(CNN) — There’s not much you can do when you’re watching your clothes spin round and around, waiting for the laundry to wash and dry. But when Lily Zhang was seven years old, she spent that laundry time learning about another kind of spin, and with it she launched a career – not that she knew it at the time.

Her dad was a math professor at Stanford in California and there was a table tennis table in the launderette; that’s where her remarkable journey began.

“My parents are both from China,” the table tennis Olympian told CNN Sports. “It’s kind of the national sport there, everyone plays. It was really just a fun little game; I had no idea where it would lead me.”

A visit to the local table tennis club really opened her eyes to the possibilities, the technique, strategy and intensity of it really captured her imagination.

“I just fell in love with the game,” she explained, “I dove in headfirst.”

Asked if she felt as though she had a natural talent for table tennis, she chuckled, “I mean, I don’t want to brag, but yeah. I do think I had a natural affinity to the sport.”

She’s humble in person, but Zhang has every reason to brag. At the age of 12, she was playing for the under-15 US national team, by 12 she had made the senior team and just four years later she traveled to London, the youngest table tennis player at the 2012 Olympics. Her success was so rapid that she admits it was overwhelming.

“I remember multiple times in the Games thinking, like, ‘Why am I here?’” she recalled. “During the opening ceremonies, I remember it was Serena Williams to my right and Kobe Bryant to my left, it was so surreal.”

If Zhang felt overwhelmed in London, she was much more comfortable around players her own age at the 2014 Youth Olympics in China, where she won a bronze medal, becoming the first American table tennis player ever to make the podium at any Olympic-level event. But despite her success, she says table tennis wasn’t really the grand plan.

“In the US, it’s pretty customary for kids to stop playing once they reach university age, so I think my initial plan or vision was to just make the Olympics, get that on my college resumé and then focus on education,” she said.

Nonetheless, she returned to the 2016 Olympics in Rio, and no matter how hard she has tried, she just couldn’t let the sport go; the details of her story are reminiscent of Al Pacino’s famous line in The Godfather Part III: “Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in!”

“I’ve quit multiple times in my career,” she explained. “I’ve pretty much quit after every Olympics I’ve attended, but there’s something about the sport just kept calling my name and I still feel like I have some unfinished business. Table tennis is something that I really, really love and it feels ingrained in my identity.”

In fact, she identifies so much with the game that she took her partner, Jessie Xiao, to a table tennis bar on their first date in San Francisco and challenged her to a game, without revealing that she was an Olympic player.

“Looking back, it was a cringy move, but at the end of the day, it worked!” she said.

In an attempt to level the playing field, Zhang at least played with her iPhone, instead of a bat.

After graduating from university, Zhang moved to Germany to become a professional player and she has since played in two more Olympic tournaments, Tokyo and Paris, where in 2024 she made it to a career-best round of 16. It was also in Paris where a clip of the US basketball star Anthony Edwards challenging Zhang to a game of table tennis went viral.

The exchange has just been featured more fully in “Serious Business with Anthony Edwards” on Amazon Prime, in which Zhang is so confident of victory that she gifts him a 10-point start in a first to 11-point game.

It was around the Paris Olympics that Zhang and Xiao became more public about their relationship on social media and they have built an inspiring profile in the LGBTQ+ community.

“She’s always been my No. 1 supporter,” Zhang said. “Encouraged me to follow my dreams, even when I myself don’t know if I should do that.”

Sometimes Xiao is even more than just a cheerleader: “Table tennis is a bit underfunded in the US, I oftentimes to have a coach. She will take that spot sometimes and even though she might not know table tennis form technical standpoint, she helps me through the really tough moments. I’m the luckiest girl in the world; I wouldn’t be here without her.”

Now aged 29, Zhang’s star continues to rise; in 2023, Major League Table Tennis became the first professional league for the sport in the United States and in December, the Bay Area Blasters’ star became the first female player to top its power rankings. In fact, she was the only female player in the top 10.

“I was really surprised and shocked,” she said, “but at the same time it’s such an amazing feeling. All those years of hard work and time and effort really paid off in the end. Sports is more male dominated, I never had that example growing up as a young girl, hopefully it shows another young girl out there watching that anything is possible.”

Zhang’s ascension to the summit just so happened to coincide with the release of Timothee Chalamet’s box-office smash Marty Supreme, a film based on the life of the table tennis player and hustler Marty Reisman. She feels that the sport’s role in the movie can only boost the profile of the game in the United States, which will be hosting the next summer games in Los Angeles.

If Zhang makes the team again in 2028, it would mark her fifth Olympic appearance, however she’s taking nothing for granted.

“Right now, I’m in the mindset of trying to take it day by day and to really stay in the moment and enjoy the game,” she said, “because there are times where I’ve lost my vision of why I started playing in the first place. It became more about the results, the rankings, the points. I got caught up in that and that’s when the game became not as fun for me.”

But there is no question that playing in the LA Olympics would complete the most extraordinary narrative arc, a spin cycle that could take her from the laundromat to the biggest stage in sport, just down the road from where it all began.

The-CNN-Wire
™ & © 2026 Cable News Network, Inc., a Warner Bros. Discovery Company. All rights reserved.