Michelle struijk

FIH Hockey Pro League: The new FIH Hockey Pro League season kicked off with two high-quality encounters featuring three of the teams that contested gold-medal matches at Paris 2024.

The women’s sides got the tournament underway in Hangzhou, with Olympic silver medallists China taking on third-ranked Belgium for the first time since their hotly contested semifinal showdown in Paris, with the Chinese once again prevailing in a shootout.

The Chinese have troubled the world's best teams over the past year, most recently knocking Belgium out of the Paris Olympics in a semifinal shootout before losing narrowly to the Dutch in the gold-medal match. They started their FIH Hockey Pro League campaign with high expectations and bossed long periods of a high-paced first half before Xu Wenyu opened their account with a 20th-minute penalty corner strike.