Because of the history and continuing domination of a particular association (through merit, skill and no other fault) the Olympics is now a best of the rest lesser sporting “competition”. Therefore in this particular sporting table tennis (under ITTF rules) meeting only one or a maximum of two participants may be invited per association as although you may have arguably the usual four or even more regularly most winning players in a real fair and open tournament from the usual most winning association you will have no opportunity to exercise your skill and potentially overall winning abilities as you can only do so if you represent a new lesser association as one of two leading players from this other lesser association and then be allowed to complete despite your ability and proven open tournament winning record.

Having one or a maximum of two players from any association would therefore as evidenced in past more open Olympic Games ensure that there is technically no possibility of the clean podium sweep. In the past it is evidently clear that the third bronze medal have been awarded to possibly a player who may have otherwise not been able to reach the semi finals in a knock out open tournament if all other normally more wining players also entered the same competition.

Conversely the Olympics rather has an extreme open acceptability and global community spirit as in past games new non geographic stateless amateur refugee participants were invited despite their evidently much lower sporting ability. Taking the same pure sporting performance train of thought this indeed also is to the disadvantage to even more players of higher proven open tournament track winning records as essentially the Olympic sporting standards have been lowered to a very extraordinarily mixed ability performance level.

Perhaps if some players and regular proven open tournament winners can temporarily gain an invitation through representation of a UN refugee stateless status or perhaps a new as yet unrecognised quasi nation then players like the obvious ones mentioned in the above post and many others may be able to “compete” or at least have the opportunity to defeat lesser performance level “qualifying” Olympics players who are evidently making up numbers as “Olympian participants” along the line of invited judges and umpires as proven time after time until perhaps some new young as yet undiscovered rising star some how emerges on to the scene through Olympic participation and we all know from repeated history which association(s) those players factually have materialised from!