Paris Olympics 2024: India secure historic quotas in table tennis team events

The Indian men's and women's table tennis teams have obtained quotas for the Paris 2024 Olympics based on their respective rankings, the International Table Tennis Federation (ITTF) confirmed on Monday.

Paris 2024 will mark the first time that India will have representation in the team events at the Olympics. 

Both the men's and women's team events were introduced in the Olympic programme at Beijing 2008.

The Indian men, 15th in the world team rankings, and the Indian women ranked 13th, secured the quotas based on the latest rankings for March. 

A total of 16 table tennis teams will compete in each of the men's and women's team events at the Paris Olympics.

According to the rules, the highest-ranked teams, which hadn't qualified directly through any of the qualifying tournaments held before, obtained quotas to Paris 2024 through the rankings route.

Besides the Indian women, Thailand (11), Poland (12) and Sweden (15) made the cut for Paris 2024 through the rankings pathway.

Croatia (12) and Slovenia (11), meanwhile, were the other teams who secured their spots in the men's event.

The Indian teams had missed out on Olympic quotas after failing to qualify for the quarter-finals of the World Team Table Tennis Championships Finals 2024 last month.

However, with the team quotas now secured through rankings, India also obtained two quotas each in the men's and women's singles events.

As National Olympic Committees (NOC) have the exclusive authority for the representation of their respective countries at the Olympic Games, athletes' participation at the Paris Games depends on their NOC selecting them to represent their delegation at Paris 2024.

For the table tennis team events, the competition at the Paris Olympics will start from the round of 16 onwards.

At the Tokyo 2020 Olympics, India sent a four-member table tennis contingent that included veteran Sharath Kamal, Sathiyan Gnanasekaran, Sutirtha Mukherjee and Manika Batra.

However, they competed in singles and mixed doubles only. India are yet to win a medal in table tennis at the Olympics.