Table tennis is the slowest-growing among racket sports in India. That impression is largely because there is no poster girl or poster boy for the sport in the country. But the mixed doubles bronze won by Diya Chitale and Manush Shah at the Asian Games indicates India’s slow but steady progress. The duo defeated Hong Kong’s World No. 4 pair, Wong Chun-Ting and Doo Hoi Kem, but lost in the semis to the World No.1 Chinese pair, Wang Chuqin and Sun Yingsha.

Amid the shambles at the shooting range and the slow start in other sports, TT has made unheralded progress. This is the racket sport’s fourth bronze after the medals won by the men’s team and Manika Batra-Sharath Kamal mixed doubles in 2018 and Ayhika Mukherjee-Sutirtha Mukherjee in women’s doubles in 2022. TT has a thriving national league, the UTT. But Manush from Vadodara and Diya from Mumbai have kept the legacy of the sport’s traditional TT hubs. They won a Muscat World Table Tennis Contender title earlier this year, defeating the Chinese pair of Huang Youzheng and Shi Xunyao. Last year, they became the first Indian pair to qualify for the season-ending WTT Finals. This incremental growth has gone unnoticed.

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Table Tennis is a global sport because of low entry-level expenses, but it is among the toughest at the Asian Games, where China, Japan and Korea tend to be impregnable. A toehold for India is significant, especially because the sport remains riddled with problems, including borderline selection calls. Players get little recognition unless an Olympic medal arrives. Ayhika Mukherjee’s victory over World No.1 Sun Yingsha at the World Team Championships, for instance, hardly stirred any Indians. But an Asian Games medal helps.