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Indian table tennis players will commence their preparations for the Birmingham Commonwealth Games by competing in the WTT Contender tournament from February 27. The tournament, set to take place in Oman, will also help them prepare for the Hangzhou Asian Games.
A 12-member Indian table tennis team will compete in the WTT Contender. Sathiyan Gnanasekaran (World No. 32), Harmeet Desai (World No. 80) and Anthony Amalraj (World No. 99) are Indians among the top-100 male players in the world. Similarly, Manika Batra (World No. 49) and Archana Kamath (World No. 99) figure in the top-100 women players.
Other members of the squad include Manav Thakkar, Sanil Shetty, Manush Shah, Sutirtha Mukherjee, Diya Chitale, Akula Sreeja, Reeth Rishya and Ayhika Mukherjee.
The WTT Contender will be the first preparatory outing for the players in the new year. Incidentally, this will be the first squad to travel abroad since the court-appointed Committee of Administrators (CoA), headed by retired Justice Gita Mittal, assumed charge last week.
The Indian table tennis players will be accompanied by coaches Arup Basak and Subhajit Saha.
The CoA has also cleared 11 players who will either self-fund or undertake the trip under the Target Olympic Podium Scheme (TOPS). They include promising youngsters Payas Jain, Yashaswini Ghorpade, Suhana Saini and Prapti Sen.
The qualifying rounds at the WTT Contender will begin on Sunday while the main draw starts on March 2.
Indian players to also participate in table tennis smash-hit event
Meanwhile, 11 Indian players (five men and six women) will compete in the inaugural Singapore Smash 2022 championships from March 7 to 20.
World No. 33 and second-best Indian paddler Achanta Sharath Kamal, who opted out of the WTT Contender citing personal reasons, will be seen in action. This will be Sharath Kamal's first tournament since a recent knee procedure he underwent in Chennai.
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Indian players for the Singapore Smash include Sathiyan Gnanasekaran, Harmeet Desai, Anthony Amalraj and Manav Thakkar among the men. Manika Batra, Archana Kamath, Sutirtha Mukherjee, Akula Sreeja, Ayhika Mukherjee and Madhurika Patkar are among the women participants.
The event carries a total prize purse of USD 2 million, and even the qualifiers will gain from their participation as $184,000 is earmarked for them.
The prize money correspondingly goes up if a player manages to enter the 64-player main draw in the singles (men and women), with $1.5 million allocated for disbursement.
The singles winner stands to carry home $100,000, along with 2,000 world ranking points, the highest ever.
The men's and women's doubles will have 24 pairs each and 16 entries in the mixed pair event.
