Singapore women’s table tennis team fails to qualify for Olympics
The Singapore women’s table tennis team has missed out on qualifying for the Paris 2024 Olympics.
This is the first time the team failed to make the cut, The Straits Times (ST) reported.
The team comprises the trio Zhou Jingyi, Zeng Jian, and Wong Xin Ru.
President of the Singapore Table Tennis Association (STTA), Ms Poh Li San acknowledged that the women’s team is “admittedly still rather raw and inexperienced compared to the other teams”.
With an average age of 21 years old, the Singapore women’s team is the second-youngest team of the 64 teams in WTT Championships, said Ms Poh.
Knocked out of World Table Tennis Championships
Last month, the team lost during the Round of 32 matches at the ITTF World Team Table Tennis Championships in Busan, South Korea.
The Singapore team, comprising of Zhou Jingyi, Zeng Jian, and Wong Xin Ru, lost 0 – 3 to their Polish opponents.
If the team had moved on to the remaining 16 teams in the tournament, they would have secured their ticket to the Olympics, having accumulated sufficient ranking points.
As a result of the loss, the Republic’s world ranking has also dropped from 10th to 18th.
This means that the Olympics qualification was no longer within their reach. The remaining four spots based on world rankings were given to Thailand (No. 11), Poland (12), India (13) and Sweden (15).
In a statement to MS News, Ms Poh stated that Singapore’s ranking as 10th in the world was due to the strong performance of Feng Tianwei, Yu Mengyu, and Lin Ye at the Tokyo Olympics.
These three players have since retired and are now replaced by a younger group of paddlers who have inherited the 10th seed ranking.
STTA president says team is comparably young and inexperienced
“This is a new era for STTA, following the retirement of several key players after the Tokyo Olympics,” said Ms Poh.
At present, both Singapore’s Men’s and Women’s Teams are made up of almost all local-born players.
These players have been trained through STTA’s Junior Development Squad (JDS) and Singapore Sports School School-Within-A-School system.
“Zeng Jian is the only foreign-born talent in the national team and she only started representing Singapore in 2022, at the SEA Games in Vietnam,” added Ms Poh.
Moreover, she stressed that the women’s team had an average age of 21, making it the second-youngest team at the world championships, after Japan.
“Hence, our team is admittedly still rather raw and inexperienced compared to the other teams.”
Also read: Both S’pore men & women’s teams eliminated from World Team Table Tennis Championships
Both S’pore men & women’s teams eliminated from World Team Table Tennis Championships
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Featured image adapted from Team Singapore on Facebook.
