It was one of the most significant developments of the post-war era: China finally abandoning its close relationship with the Soviet Union to begin detente with the USA. Astonishingly, the man who helped make it happen was a British aristocrat, Ivor Montagu, a Soviet spy who dined with Stalin. Even more remarkably, the means to this rapprochement was table tennis, a sport loved by both Chairman Mao and Montagu. For years, Montagu had lived a dual life, working to spread communism and also table tennis around the world. Surprisingly, the two strands of his career would come together in an event of global significance. Nicholas Griffin weaves a compelling story to reveal the background to the famous occasion in 1971, when the USA, led by a 19-year-old hippie Glenn Cowan, took on the Chinese table tennis team, led by world champion Zhuang Zedong, who was imprisoned during the Cultural Revolution, in front of 18,000 fans in Beijing. It was the beginning of a thaw in Sino-US relations that forced the Soviets into a crippling arms race that would end the Cold War. Sometimes sport truly can have the biggest consequences.
