China's youth coaches have said the country's first Youth Olympic Games without a table tennis medal showed that its young players cannot yet cope with pressure, and that pressure training must become part of their daily work.

Wu Hao, the boys' coach, and Zheng Changgong, the girls' coach, spoke to Xinhua in Dakar after the table tennis competition ended on Thursday. China's two players, both 17, went out in the quarter-finals of the boys' singles and the mixed doubles and in the last 16 of the girls' singles.

Lost on the key points

Wu said both of Li Hechen's defeats came down to a handful of points. "Both matches we lost were lost on key points. In the mixed doubles it was after 10-10, and in the singles it was also after 10-10. We were not decisive enough on the key points," he said.

Li and Yao Ruixuan lost their mixed doubles quarter-final 3-1 to Japan's Ryusei Kawakami and Miku Matsushima, with two of the four games going beyond 10-10, 15-13 to China and 15-13 to Japan. Li then lost his singles quarter-final 4-1 to Colombia's Emanuel Otálvaro, who took the fifth game 12-10 and went on to win the silver medal.

Wu said there was little difference in technical ability between the leading junior boys, and that Li had fallen short of expectations in both events. The problems, he said, were again his ability to handle pressure and how he played the crucial points.

Yao recovered from 3-1 down to 3-3 against Taiwan's Chen Min-hsin in the last 16 but lost the seventh game. "In the seventh game Chen Min-hsin attacked faster and went for more winners. She was clearly more ruthless and more decisive," Zheng said. Chen went on to take the gold, beating Singapore's Loy Ming Ying 4-2 in the final.

Yao had won all three of her earlier matches against Chen, but they were two years ago, and Xinhua reported that neither player knew much about how the other plays now.

A strong record coming in

China chose the pair after several rounds of selection. Each country could send one boy and one girl, who played the singles and the mixed doubles together, and Li and Yao had won several mixed doubles titles at the World Youth Championships and Asian youth events.

Yao won the girls' singles at the 2025 Asian Youth Games and the youth women's singles at China's 15th National Games. Li was the under-15 boys' champion at the 2024 World Youth Championships and beat Kawakami in the under-15 final of that year's Asian Youth Championships. He won singles silver at the 2025 Asian Youth Games and in the under-19 event at this year's Asian Youth Championships.

What China will change

The coaches said that working on players' psychology alone would not solve the problem, and that technique and mental strength had to improve together. Wu said the players needed a firmer technical base, clearer individual strengths and reliable ways of winning points when the score is tight, so that they have a clear tactical choice at the crucial moments. Pressure training, he said, would become part of everyday practice.

Both coaches described Dakar as a wake-up call as the balance of power in youth table tennis shifts. Japan won the boys' singles, through Kawakami, and the mixed doubles. China had won a medal at every Youth Olympics since the first, in Singapore in 2010, including all three titles in Nanjing in 2014 and Buenos Aires in 2018.

"The team faces a lot of difficulties now, but I believe that through hard work, and by sharpening our mentality and technique, we can overcome them. At the next competition we can win it back," Wu said.