Han Xiao hoping to grab a U.S. place at the pingpong table

When the best table-tennis player in North America is ranked 149th in the world, and that player is Canadian, it means that any American player with hopes of qualifying for this year’s London Olympics really is just playing for the chance to get a first-hand view of the Olympic experience.

That’s a major accomplishment, of course, but it also means American table-tennis players have to treat their sport with a little less medal fever and a little more objectivity.

“For us, the end goal is just participating,” said Han Xiao, 25, of Germantown, Md. “If you could win a match, it would be amazing.”

The best-case scenario is that the U.S. will send three men to London. Xiao hopes to be one of them. But he’ll need to finish in the top four at the American trials next month in Cary, N.C., and then win one of three spots available to North Americans in a showdown with Canada in April.

Xiao, who was born in China but came to the U.S. as a toddler, picked up the sport as a boy and quickly progressed to the point that he spent his teenage years traveling to the Pan Am Games and multiple world championships. He won three national titles in doubles and was named the sport’s U.S. player of the year at 15. He was a prodigy and served as the poster boy for a new generation of players that was raised in the American system, instead of imports from China or other countries who became American citizens.

He was so highly regarded, in fact, The Washington Post Magazine wrote a cover story on him, titled “The Golden Child,” in 2007 that chronicled his preparation for the tournaments that served as qualifiers for the Beijing Olympics.

Xiao was at his peak then but still lost a seven-game match for the final North American Olympic berth to David Zhuang, a Chinese-import American who was in his 40s.

Sitting at a table in the Maryland Table Tennis Center in Gaithersburg just before Christmas, Xiao described the 2008 match as a psychological battle won by Zhuang due to a mix of maturity and gamesmanship.

“The umpiring wasn’t good. I wasn’t as experienced as he was. There was a let service that kind of messed with my rhythm,” he said, ticking off a list of things that went wrong. “I came back, but it wasn’t quite enough. He beat me 11-8 in the seventh game.”

But the loss wasn’t a major setback. Xiao got on with his life and graduated from the University of Maryland later that year with dual degrees in computer science and business.

“I have been focusing on my job and career,” said Xiao of the past four years. “Table tennis is a smaller sport. You can’t really make money doing it.”

He’s dedicated himself to learning the computer-programming business, working on what he calls “big data, cloud-type stuff,” perhaps applying the same principles to his career that made a teenage table-tennis star.

He doesn’t flaunt his pingpong prowess — most of the people he works with at TexelTek in Columbia don’t even know he’s one of the top players in the country. He avoids Comet Ping Pong, the D.C. pizza parlor where patrons kill time after ordering by playing pingpong. If he’s not playing with someone of his caliber, he’s generally not playing. It’s not a party trick.

“If I’m somewhere there’s a pingpong table and some cheap rackets, I’ll avoid it,” he said. “I know as soon as I get on there, I won’t be able to get off the table. So I just avoid it, I don’t even mention that I know how to play.”

In fact, Xiao has become involved in growing the sport as a member of USA Table Tennis’ board of directors, and most of his matches the past few years have been with serious, up-and-coming youth players such as Tong Tong Gong, 14, of Ellicott City. He’s also served as a practice partner for Peter Li, 18, of Scaggsville. It wasn’t even until a few weeks before the U.S. national championship event in early December that Xiao began to put in some serious training.

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