News – Table tennis Australia

Published Sun 1 Aug 2021

The Australian Table Tennis Olympics will return to the field as the men’s and women’s team events begin today at the Tokyo Metropolitan Gymnasium.

The women’s team will rise first and face Germany in 3rd place at 3.30pm AEST, while the men’s team will face Japan tomorrow, Monday 2 August, at 11am AEST.

The team event format consists of a pair match followed by two individual matches. Other individual matches compete as needed until the team wins three matches. Each match in a team tournament is best decided out of five games.

Both Australian teams are facing a difficult match and their opponents will have a number of Olympics, World Championships and continental event medal winners.

Olympic debut Michelle Bromley is the new face on the Australian women’s team compared to Rio 2016, which will replace Ziyu Zhang and play alongside Melissa Tapper and Jian Fang Lay.

Lay may get a rematch against Ying Chania, who won him 4-0 in his women’s singles third-round match last Tuesday. Expert German trio Han, Shan and Solja won a silver medal at Team 2016 at the Rio 2016 Olympics, the only non-Asian team to have won a medal at this event.

The men’s team faces an even greater challenge. 3-seeded Japan, a team that boasts one of the newly crowned Olympic winners from the June Mizutan mixed pairs. He and Niwa were also team members who won silver at this event at the Rio 2016 Olympics, losing 3-1 to China in the final. 18-year-old rising talent Tomokazu Harimoto brings the team to Tokyo.

The Australian men’s team is unchanged from previous Olympics, with Heming Hu, Chris Yan and David Powell representing Australia for the second time.

The overall victory or even success of either team in any individual match would make history, as no Australian player has ever won a competition at a team event since the format was introduced at the 2008 Olympics.

GALLERY