In 1988, when eight-time national champion Kamlesh Mehta, the first star of Indian table tennis, participated in the Olympics Games, he first came to know what nutrition and physical training actually was.
In 2008, when Achanta Sharath Kamal, the game-changer who revolutionised Indian table tennis and eventually broke Mehta’s record for national titles, went to Olympics, he had just a couple of basic training camps in India and Europe.
Cut to 2021 and four Indian paddlers – Sharath Kamal, Sathiyan Gnanasekaran, Manika Batra and Sutirtha Mukherjee – booked their Tokyo Games tickets for singles. To go with that, a mixed doubles berth was sealed by Sharath Kamal and Batra, beating the top seeds at the Asian qualification event as the icing on the cake. It was a significant achievement, yet somehow it felt like an expected development given the years of development in training, exposure and success.
“When I qualified for the Olympics at the age of 20, I had no inkling…