WTT Star Contender Goa 2023 table tennis: Olympic champions Ma Long, Chen Meng headline entry list
Top Indian players G Sathiyan, Manika Batra and Sharath Kamal will also feature in the Goa meet, which will be the first WTT event to be held in India.
Table Tennis
China’s Ma Long and Chen Meng, the reigning men’s and women’s singles Olympic table tennis champions, respectively, will be among the top global stars competing at the WTT Star Contender Goa 2023.
The tournament, scheduled from February 27 to March 5, will be the first-ever World Table Tennis (WTT) event to be hosted in India. The Dr Shyama Prasad Mukherjee Indoor Stadium at the Goa University campus in Panaji will be the venue for the tournament.
The 34-year-old Ma Long, widely regarded as the best table tennis player to have ever played the game, is a two-time Olympic champion. Ma Long’s countryman and rival Fan Zhendong, the current world champion and world No. 1, will also be in the fray in the men’s singles.
Sharath Kamal and Sathiyan Gnanasekaran will spearhead the Indian challenge. G Sathiyan won the men’s singles bronze at the 2022 Commonwealth Games in Birmingham and was a part of India’s gold medal-winning men’s team. He also won a silver in the men’s doubles event at CWG 2022.
Veteran Sharath Kamal is the reigning CWG men’s singles champion. The world No. 47 also won the mixed doubles and men’s team gold medals at Birmingham 2022.
World No. 4 Tomakazu Harimoto of Japan, world No. 6 Truls Moregard of Sweden, world No. 8 Lin Yun-Ju from Chinese Taipei and world No. 9 Darko Jorgic from Slovenia are some of the other top names who will play the men’s singles competition at the WTT Star Contender Goa 2023.
Accompanying Tokyo 2020 gold medallist Chen Meng in the women’s section will be her compatriot Sun Yingsha, the current world No, 1, and Hina Hayata of Japan, the fifth-ranked player in the world.
World No. 8 Kasumi Ishikawa of Japan, world No. 9 Doo Hoi Kem of Hong Kong and world No. 10 Ying Han from Germany will be the other top 10-ranked players in action.
World No. 34 Manika Batra will be India’s best hope in women’s singles.
India’s reigning national women’s singles and doubles champion Sreeja Akula will be competing in the qualifiers with other Indian table tennis players like Reeth Teenison, Diya Chitale, Swastika Ghosh, Harmeet Desai and Sanil Shetty and many more.
Some of the other top international names to watch out for at the Goa meet include Yukiya Uda, the 2018 Asian Games bronze medallist, Lee San-Su and CWG 2022 silver medallist Liam Pitchford in the men’s single event.
Jeon Jihee, Liu Weishan, Shin Yubin and Tokyo Olympics women’s team event silver medallist Miu Hirano will be competing in the women’s singles draw.