The Ticket

• Only weeks after the team’s headline-making tour, Australia’s then opposition leader, Gough Whitlam, led a delegation to Beijing promising to open diplomatic relations “when elected”.
• One was table tennis, one was basketball and one was volleyball.
• One was table tennis, one was basketball and one was volleyball.

‘A crowd of 8,000 people’

• A revolutionary who became one of China’s most revered statesmen, he advocated peaceful co-existence with the West and other nations.
• The American team embarked on their tour first – setting the stage for then-President Richard Nixon’s famous visit to Beijing in 1972.
• Paul Pinkewich had just turned 20 at the time of the visit, teammate Steve Knapp was only 18.
• Our first match in Canton, now Guangzhou, I think it was a crowd of 8,000 people,” he recalls.
• “Do you wear this hair because of your disagreement with society or because it is a style?” Knapp replied, “It is the fashion.”

• “Can you believe, one table in the middle of the Capital Stadium [in Beijing] with 18,000 spectators, and that was just an amazing experience.
• But they always let the woman win.” That woman was Anne Middleton, the other player on the 1971 tour, who has since passed away.
• After the trip we were labelled as communists […] but we were interested in friendship first, competition second.”

Why sport diplomacy matters

• Beijing has continued to use sport as a diplomatic tool, including becoming the first city in the world to host both a summer and winter Olympic Games (Beijing in 2008 and 2022).
• French educator Baron Pierre de Coubertin founded the International Olympic Committee in 1894, believing Olympics were a global event.
• A new term has also emerged in recent years – almost always applied by researchers in democratic nations – to describe undemocratic nations’ forays into global sport: sportswashing.
• “Amity between people holds the key to sound relations between countries.” At the heart of such amity, sport continues to play a significant role.

Tracey Holmes was one of the fifty Australians interviewed in the 'Fifty People, Fifty Stories' book due to her experiences of previously living and working in China.