Just about two weeks in the past, 4 Indian paddlers booked their tickets to the upcoming 2020 Tokyo Olympic Games. The achievement, although an enormous one, didn’t come as a shock and is clear of the rising tradition of table tennis in India over time. Today we have now six Indians in the top-100 of the senior world rankings, the boys’s workforce is positioned in the top-10 whereas the world number one in the U-21 class can be from India.
On the big day of World Table Tennis Day, listed here are the top-5 milestone moments of Indian table tennis which have contributed to the resurgence of the game in the nation.
Chasing an Olympics dream
The upcoming Tokyo Olympics will see 4 Indian paddlers—Achanta Sharath Kamal, Sathiyan Gnanasekaran, Manika Batra and Sutirtha Mukherjee—main a powerful problem. While the quartet function in respective singles classes, the pair of Sharath and Manika can even symbolize the nation in mixed-doubles, which will probably be performed for the primary time on the Olympics, aiming to finish the nation’s look forward to an elusive medal in the game on the Olympics. The journey which was initiated for the primary time ever on the 1988 Seoul Olympics the place the trio of Kamlesh Mehta, Sujay Ghorpade and Niyati Roy-Shah participated and registered India’s maiden look in TT on the prestigious occasion.
2006 CWG: Sensational Sharath
A 6-feet 2-inch lanky paddler from Tamil Nadu introduced his arrival on the worldwide circuit in the early 2000s and shortly the world witnessed glimpses of the talents acquired by India’s then ‘legend in the making’. Achanta Sharath Kamal clinched gold on the 2004 Commonwealth TT Championship and likewise made his maiden Olympics look the identical yr. Two years later, Sharath etched his title into historical past books and scripted a brand new chapter in Indian TT when he outclassed native favorite William Henzell in Melbourne to change into the primary Indian paddler to win a gold medal on the Commonwealth Games. India’s present top-ranked paddler Sharath, who has a file 9 senior nationwide titles to his title, has been getting ready with gusto to provide a memorable present in his fourth Olympics on the Tokyo Games.
UTT and TTFI scripting a brand new period
Table Tennis Federation of India’s (TTFI) sturdy home initiatives acquired an additional increase as Vita Dani and Niraj Bajaj based Ultimate Table Tennis (UTT) in 2017. UTT heralded a brand new period for the game, boosting its ecosystem with a well-connected bottom-up method that hyperlinks the grassroots to the present TTFI initiatives, whereas introducing a world-class annual league match. UTT has additionally offered a much-needed international platform the place Indian gamers get most worldwide publicity, rubbing shoulders with some of the world’s greatest. The inaugural version of the league noticed present Indian stars Manika Batra and Gnanasekaran Sathiyan saying their arrival on the massive stage with some breathtaking performances whereas the subsequent two seasons additionally witnessed the rise of younger and upcoming gamers like Sutirtha Mukherjee, Manav Thakkar and Archana Kamath. The league has documented some of the world’s greatest gamers in motion and the way India has change into a TT vacation spot for these gamers. Working alongside TTFI, UTT can be targeted on grassroots growth which incorporates assist to academies, organising faculty nationals and turning into a powerful stakeholder for all main TT occasions.
2018 CWG: Manika’s magical present
The 2018 Commonwealth Games was essentially the most profitable version in the historical past of Indian TT because the contingent concluded its marketing campaign at No. 1 place with three gold, two silver and three bronze medals. However, the important thing spotlight of the workforce was the emergence of star paddler Manika Batra who produced a magical present in Gold Coast. With a victory towards Yu Mengyu from Singapore, Batra grew to become the primary Indian lady paddler to clinch the gold medal at CWG. She additionally led the ladies’s workforce to a historic gold medal triumph and bagged silver and bronze in the ladies’s and blended doubles class respectively to finish her marketing campaign on a excessive.
History in Jakarta
Fresh from the heroics at Gold Coast CWG, a couple of months later Indian TT noticed yet one more glittering chapter being added on the 2018 Asian Games in Jakarta, Indonesia. This time a workforce comprising Achanta Sharath Kamal, G Sathiyan and Anthony Amalraj gave the nation its first-ever TT medal on the second greatest sporting occasion in the world after the Olympics. Though the three-men Indian workforce misplaced to South Korea in the semi-final, they secured a bronze medal. Later, Sharath partnered with Manika Batra because the duo added yet one more bronze into the nation’s medals tally with a semi-final end in mixed-doubles.
