It's been a fantastic year for Indian table tennis, says Sharath Kamal

Adding to his previous achievements, Sharath Kamal has become the first ever Asian Games medal holder in the Indian table tennis history. He revealed that winning two medals was something of a dream for him and achieving such a thing has made him ecstatic.

“Well... winning one medal was a dream. Two... I don’t know. I can’t quite describe it. It’s an explosion of emotions. An outburst. It still hasn’t completely sunk in. I am looking forward to going back home to see the reaction there! The day we won the medal, we were playing back-to-back games (four in a day) so I was mostly just tired,” Sharath told Scroll.

“It’s been a fantastic year for Indian table tennis. We have been on an upward graph. But I don’t think this is the best time. That is yet to come. We have been doing well for a while and the process started in 2008. The improvement has been steady and there is still a lot more to come from all of us. Of course, every sports person dreams of an Olympic medal and that’s the next step,” he added.

He also said that real development in Indian table tennis came during the 2008 Commonwealth Games when they were given a lot of funds. A strong and firm structure was built at the time, which helped the sports grow.

“As I said, 2008 would be the starting point. With Delhi hosting the Commonwealth Games, we got a lot of funding so that we’d do well there. That was when the basic structure was built. We did well in the Games but later when the scams broke out, our funding stopped. That put a halt to the progress of the game, and 2014 went bad. But we’ve been back on track since then. 2016 was the first time when we had four different qualifiers for the Olympics. Thanks to Sports India, and the Table Tennis Federation, the growth has been structured and that’s a good thing for the sport. That’s why we have had the success. I think we can achieve much more. Sathiyan and I are in the top 40, Manav Thakkar is in the top five among juniors. Recently, our juniors won four medals at the Asian level in Myanmar which has never happened before,” he said.

“It’s important to have a large pool of players doing well in the international arena. It gives the sport the kind of mileage it requires to really take off. If there are only one or two players, one cannot inspire a large fraternity to take up the game, make it popular. It develops a good ecosystem for the sport when you have such competition among the players from the same country. It makes a player better,” he added.

He also shared the whole healing process, after he received a hamstring tear in 2014 at the World Championships. He said the Asian Games medal was a great achievement for the whole team. This whole year the team had been performing well in the tournaments and the Asian Games success was the biggest of them all.

“It took me six months to recover, physically. I was on a wheelchair for four weeks. I didn’t know how I was going to recover from that to get back to playing. That injury was not seen before in Indian table tennis so my physios, doctors didn’t know how exactly to treat it. Blessing in disguise, I was in Germany in that time and my Bundesliga club - Borussia Dusseldorf – helped with the recovery completely. It is because of them that I am still playing today. And during those six months, at the start of the rehab, trying to walk for instance, it was quite depressing. I didn’t know if I could run again. I didn’t know what the future held. And it was my wife stood by me during the worst of times. She was quite the support for me. You need somebody to fall back on in those times and she did that for me perfectly,” Sharath said.

“I wouldn’t say something clicked at the Asian Games. We have been doing well on the tour consistently, upsetting higher-ranked players frequently, going deeper in tournaments. When three-four players go to a tournament, consistently at least one does well these days and that has just increased our confidence as a team. For instance, in the match against Japan (men’s team quarterfinal), we were not nervous, thinking this was a golden chance for a medal, that this was a do-or-die situation,” he added.