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| Sutirtha Mukherjee |
Table Tennis at the Summer Olympics:
Table Tennis, also popularly known as “Ping-Pong”, is one of the most famous sports around the world, and is played by the individuals of almost every nation. Table tennis is governed by International Table Tennis Foundation (IITF), which was founded in 1926. Table tennis was included in the Summer Olympics in 1988 and is played since. Initially, there were 4 categories of table tennis in the Olympics, which is, Men’s Singles, Men’s Doubles, Women’s Singles and Women’s Doubles. But from 2008 Beijing Olympics, the doubles events were replaced by a team event.
Indians and their success stories in the sport:
Indians are also fond of table tennis as well. It has lately become a quite fruitful sport in terms of international success. The first star of Indian table tennis is known to be Kamlesh Mehta, who participated in the 1988 Olympics. He was also an eight-time national champion. Later in 2008, Achanta Sharath Kamal broke Mehta’s record of national championships and also went to the Olympics. The biggest break Indian table tennis got was at 2018 Asian Games, where India won two medals, for the first time in the history of Asian Games.
Sutirtha Mukherjee, India’s dark horse:
4 Indians have qualified for the Tokyo Olympics 2021. 3 of them, Achanta Sharath Kamal, Manika Batra and Sathiyan Gnanasekaran are comparatively well known sportspersons. But we will shift our focus to the fourth member, Sutirtha Mukherjee from Bengal. Bengal has seen many talented TT players like Poulomi Ghatak, Ankita Das, Soumyajit Ghosh, Mouma Das etc. Sutirtha is a also promising young paddler. Born on 10th October 1995 at Naihati, Sutirtha took table tennis not only out of interest, but also to fight her weight issues as a child. She is known to be an extremely attacking player with the backhand smash as her main weapon. Her coach is former Arjuna awardee Soumyadeep Roy. She has seen quite massive ups and downs in her career. She won the gold in the team event at Commonwealth Games. Just 2 years ago, her world ranking was 502. But later she broke into the top 100, and became the 2nd ranked Indian woman paddler, behind Manika Batra. Sutirtha first took part in the Women’s Junior World Championships in 2013, her first major breakthrough. Later she also took part in the tournaments like Women’s Asian Championships, Women’s Australian Open and the Korea Open in the following years. But her career suffered a major setback in 2016, when she was banned for 2 years by the Table Tennis Federation of India for giving false age records.
Sutirtha won the 2017 and 2020 national championships and made a great comeback to the sport. She also played in the franchise based tournament Ultimate Table Tennis, where she performed exceptionally well and won all her matches.
Ultimately, Sutirtha booked her berth in the Tokyo Olympics 2020 at the Asian Qualifiers held in Doha, Qatar. Indian table tennis contingent is hoping that Sutirtha Mukherjee performs well and becomes the dark horse in the Women’s Single event. She has already made not only his country, but also his home state West Bengal very proud. And hopefully, she will be able to contribute to the rich sporting history of West Bengal in the Tokyo Olympics and also in near future.
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