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

“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.

“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 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.