Sreeja Akula, Manika Batra Highest-Seeded Indian Players At Olympics

New Delhi: Sreeja Akula (Sixteenth) and Manika Batra (18th) are the optimum-seeded Indian gamers at the Paris 2024 Olympics table tennis match, which starts on July 27.

The World Desk Tennis Federation (ITTF) revealed the seedings on Tuesday. A entire of Sixty seven gamers are seeded in every of the guys’s and girls’s singles competitions, whereas sixteen teams every are seeded for every crew activities, as per a launch by technique of Olympics.com.

Closing month, Sreeja Akula reached a profession-best No. 24 in the realm table tennis rankings, displacing Manika Batra as India’s pinnacle girls’s singles player.

The 25-year-old Sreeja, a two-time countrywide champion, converted into the first Indian table tennis player to win a WTT Contender singles title at Lagos in June. Partnering with Archana Kamath, she additionally bagged the doubles title.

World No. 28 Manika Batra, meanwhile, is seeded most nice two locations beneath her compatriot at the Paris 2024 Olympics.

A former Commonwealth Games champion, Manika made the Saudi Smash girls’s singles quarterfinal in May, opening to be the first Indian singles table tennis player to gather the final eight of a WTT Grand Smash match. Manika shall be making her 1/3 straight look in the Olympics.

Sharath Kamal is powerfuble to make his fifth Olympic look. The two-time Commonwealth Games guys’s singles champion is seeded twenty fourth at the Paris 2024 Olympics. At Tokyo 2020, the forty-one-year-old veteran converted into ousted in the 1/3 spherical, his best finish at the Olympic Games it definitely is why a tools.

Countrywide champion Harmeet Desai, ranked 86th in the realm in guys’s singles, is seeded forty ninth. He'll make his Olympic debut.

Meanwhile, India will debut in the crew table tennis activities at the upcoming Olympics, the location the 4 singles gamers shall be joined by technique of Manav Thakkar (guys’s crew) and Archana Kamath (girls’s crew).

The two the guys’s and girls’s crew activities were introduced to the Olympic programme at Beijing in 2008.

Seeded 14th at Paris 2024, the Indian guys’s table tennis crew is many of the pinnacle 5 Asian teams. Manika Batra and Co. are seeded eleventh in the girls’s crew match.

All six Indian table tennis gamers made the curb for Paris 2024 by their world rankings. There may nicely be no Indian illustration in the combined doubles match, the launch additional.

Desk tennis at the Paris 2024 Olympics shall be performed between July 27 and August 10. All 5 competitions – guys’s singles, girls’s singles, combined doubles, guys’s crew and girls’s crew – shall be played at the South Paris Space.