By Paritosh Pramanik
NAGPUR, May 13, 2022
She participated in three permissible events and fetched gold from all of them.
Nagpur’s talented table tennis player Jennifer Varghese is on a golden hunt these days.
From two international outings, Jennifer has claimed four gold and one silver medals forcing all to shake their heads in disbelief.
The 13-year-old Centre Point School, Katol Road, Nagpur paddler, escorted the Indian table tennis team on a golden journey as Indian boys and girls wrapped up their outing with 11 gold and 10 silver medals in the South Asian Junior and Cadet Table Tennis Championships that concluded in Male, Maldives.
Out of the 11 golds, Jennifer, who had won a gold and a
silver at World Table Tennis (WTT) Youth Contender in girls singles events at Salle Omnisport de Rades in Tunisia in March, claimed all gold medals up for grab in her cadet girls category.
Indian paddlers won four singles and four doubles titles, besides three team gold medals. To her credit, Jennifer won cadet girls singles, cadet girls team and cadet girls doubles titles making it another memorable international outing. Jennifer played with precision and showed her killer instincts devouring opponents after opponents. In the girls team final category, India defeated Nepal 3-0 with Jennifer winning her singles match against Evana 11-1, 11-5, 11-4. Later in the doubles section of the same event, Jennifer teamed up with Sandika Bhattacharjee and they defeated the pair of Evana and Bianca 9-11, 11-7, 9-11, 11-9, 11-8 to claim the title. The Indian duo were up against the Pakistani pair of Hoor Fawad and Haiqa Hassan in the cadet doubles final and they did not give an inch to their arch-rivals claiming the gold in straight games 11-6, 11-6, 11-4.
Jennifer did not stop her and showed her hunger to win golds. She stepped up to aim for her third gold in the cadet girls singles sumit clash against hosts Maldives’ Fatimah D. Jennifer took the first game but lost the second.
However, she grouped herself brilliantly in the remaining three games to clinch her third yellow metal with the scoreboard reading 13-11, 4-11, 11-5, 11-13, 11-6.
India did not field a team in the Junior Boys category, resulting in the loss of another sure-shot gold.
With the near-sweep of gold apart, the team members also boosted their overall tally with 10 silver medals to stamp their authority in the regional event.
The four-day championships that began on May 9 saw complete domination of the Indian squads in both the team events, the doubles and the singles. The gold in the Junior Boys team went to Bangladesh. Teams like Pakistan, Sri Lanka and the hosts, Maldives, had to settle for the lesser medals.
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