Eternal India Encyclopedia

Eternal India encyclopedia

SPORTS

WOMENS

SECTION

in 1967 and Indu Puri's 63rd in 1985. Indu Puri was also ranked 2nd in the Commonwealth and 8th in the Asian sections. Her best ever performance was when she beat Park Yung Sun of North Korea, then reigning world champion in the Asian championships at Kuala Lumpur in 1978. The game is a popular recreation sport as well among children and adults especially in urban cities of the country. The Indian Railway's women's team Won the world railways championship defeating Russian Railway's women 3-2 ill 1978 at then Czechoslovakia. The team comprised Indu Puri, Shailaja Sa- lokhe and Nandini Kulakmi. In 1926 India was among ten nations that formed the Interna- tional Table Tennis Federation and participated in the first world championship held in London in December of that year. India during those times was represented by students mostly living in Europe. Apart from P.N. Nanda, R.D. Subbaiah was another Indian to make a great mark in the English Table Tennis championships. Just before the formation of the international body, India was unofficially ranked second in the world with Hungary claiming the top spot. England and Austria were respectively considered third and fourth. In fact the players who represented the country in nine out of twelve world championships from 1927 to 1938 were Indians who did not live in India. Even before the formation of the Indian Table Tennis Feder- ation in 1938, the All-India and Inter-provincial championships were held in Calcutta. It was in 1939 that a truly Indian team was selected to participate in the world championships scheduled to be held in Cairo. Top world players also toured the country giving the Indians some exposure to the game. India hosted the world cham- pionships for the first time in 1952 at Bombay. The emergence of Japan as a force to reckon with during the Bombay world meet, indirectly gave birth to the formation of the Table Tennis Federation of Asia, which began to stage a biennial Asian Championships. The Rajkumari sports coaching scheme led to the emergence of young and talented players and in the 1957 Stockholm world cham- pionships India was promoted from category II to category I. India was also officially ranked 10th out of 75 nations then affiliated to the International Federation, In the same year India tied with Vietnam for the first place in the Asian Championships held in Manila. The players who earned high reputations during the 1950s include K.Nagaraja, K.Jayant, Sultana and Jayant Vohra. Some of them went on extensive tours of the continent and the US. Arjuiia Awards: J.C. Vohra, Gautam R. Desai, Usha Sunderaraj, Farok Khodaiji, Mir Kasim AH, GJagannathan, Kaity Khodaiji, N.R. Bajaj, Shailaja Salokhe, Indu Puri, Manjiit Dua, V.Chandrasekhar, Kamlesh Mehta and Niyati Shah.

50 m Free Style

Sangita Rao

Karnataka

0:29.22

1992

100 m Free Style

Anita Sood

Maharashtra

1:01.05

1984

200 m Free Style

Anitha Sood

Maharashtra

2:11.82

1984

400 m Free Style

Anitha Sood

Maharashtra

4:41.02

1984

800 m Free Style

Anitha Sood

Maharashtra

9:32.04

1984

100 m Back Stroke

Abhinaya Shetty

Karnataka

1:11.06

1994

200 m Back Stroke

Abhinaya Shetty

Karnataka

2:31.54

1994

100 m Breast Stroke

Persis Madan

Maharashtra

1:21.71

1984

200 m Breast Stroke

Sajini Shetty

Karnataka

2:51.55

1994

100 m Butterfly

Bula Choudhary

West Bengal

1:06.19

1984

200 m Butterfly

Bula Choudhary

West Bengal

2:21.76

1986

200 m Individual

Persis Madan

Maharashtra

2:32.87

1984

Medley

400 m Individual

Sajini Shetty

Karnataka

5:19.71

1994

Medley

-

4X100 Free Style

Karnataka

4:21.31

1991

Relay

4X100 Medley Relay

-

Karnataka

4:54.12

1994

Diving: Spring Board Anuja Ghosh

Gujarat

341.80 pts

1988

M. Pradesh

289.11 pts

1988

High Board Mita Agashe

Synchronized Swimming

Sole Competition

Sharmila Dhamankar

Maharashtra 127.80 pts

1986

Duet Competition

Delhi

135.10 pts

1989

Edna Shrama & Malvika Yadav

TABLE TENNIS

Though the origins of the game are not very clear, it is believed that table tennis is an ad- aptation of either Lawn Tennis or 'Real' Tennis as an indoor sport during the 1870s. A form of indoor tennis, the game was improvised in es- tablishments like messes, university, college and school common rooms. It was initially

played with cork balls introduced by an Englishman Charles Barter. This was replaced by celluloid balls which were used in America and brought to England by the British athlete Gibbs and the game was called 'ping pong' because of the noise made by the celluloid balls.The game was included in the Olympic agenda only in 1988 through the world championships have been staged regularly since 1958. It is being featured in the Asian Games since the 1958 Tokyo Asaid. In India the game dates back to 1911, though as an organised sport it got an impetus only in 1938 with the formation of the Table Tennis Federation of India. But many Indians played the game in England and the rest of Europe. P.N. Nanda won the English Open during the 1924-25 season. In the same season, he also won the German Championship without losing a single game. To the late K. Nagaraja of Karnataka goes the distinction of having been the only Indian to have reached the quarter-finals of a world championship at Tokyo. The first national championship was held in 1938 and M. Ayub emerged as the champion. The best ever international Table Tennis Federation rankings are Farokh Khodaiji's 28th in the men’s section

TENNIKOIT

A recreational sport the world over, including the decks of ships,

where it is played as ‘Deck Tennikoit' the game of tennikoit in India has been a competi- tive sport since 1965.

Till 1965, tennikoit in India was also played according to the ‘YMCA or Buck’ rules, which did not clearly define the competitive nature of the game. In 1965, a group of tennikoit lovers from Tamil Nadu, Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh decided to streamline the rules of the game by including a specific duration of