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Eternal India
encyclopedia
SPORTS
WOMENS
SECTION
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
High Board Mita Agashe
Synchronized Swimming
M. Pradesh
289.11 pts
1988
Sole Competition
Sharmila
Dhamankar
Maharashtra 127.80 pts
1986
Duet Competition
Edna Shrama &
Malvika Yadav
Delhi
135.10 pts
1989
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
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.
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