Wu Chengzhang

Shanghai’s Wu Chengzhang was a table tennis player prior to his taking interest in basketball. He eventually focused on the latter sport and was selected to represent China in the tournament at the 1948 London Olympics, where the nation won three of its matches, against Belgium, South Korea, and Iraq, and lost against Chile and the Philippines. This was not enough to advance it out of the group stage, but they did go on to defeat Great Britain and Switzerland to battle Italy for 17th place, which they lost, ranking 18th overall. Wu played in every game.

After the Olympics, Wu was recruited by the Army and turned to coaching various representative military teams. Although he retired from this job in 1984, he remained athletically active, forming the Guhua amateur senior basketball team and was still cycling into his 90s, even visiting London on the occasion of the 2012 London Games. In 2008, Wu stopped leading the Guhua team and started to play cricket. His son Wu Xinshui was a well-known basketball player who was voted as one of the 50 best Chinese players of all time in a 1999 national survey.