From our Olympics correspondent – China continued its unrivalled supremacy in para table tennis on Friday night, taking away both of the first two gold medals in the women’s doubles. The doubles format, which returned to the Paralympics this year for the first time since 1976, has so far proved disappointing for the French contenders, with fan-favourites Fabien Lamirault and Julien Michaud taking home the bronze after being beaten 3-1 by South Korea in the men’s doubles semi-finals.
In some ways, para table tennis doubles feels like the Paralympic Games in microcosm. No two athletes at the table are living with the same disability – on one side of the net, a player will lash the racket to her wrist, pulling the strap tight with her teeth. On the other, an athlete will lean over the table to serve, her weight resting on a crutch.
Another player steadies the ball on the flat of his racket inches above the table’s matt-black surface, his other arm thrown out for balance, ending just below the elbow. With an almost imperceptible flick of his wrist, he sends the ball skidding across the net, and the game begins.
For the first time since 1976, para table tennis doubles is back in the Paralympic Games. Table tennis has been a core feature of the Paralympics since they first started in 1960 – it wouldn’t make its way into the Olympics until the 1988 Summer Games in Seoul.
Para table tennis is split into 11 classes. In one through five, athletes use wheelchairs; from six through to 11, they compete standing, some using prosthetic limbs, canes or crutches. Athletes with intellectual impairments compete in the 11th division.
In doubles, not all partners are in the same class as one another, though they’re often close. Some athletes were born with their disability; others come to theirs through accident or illness later in their life. All are here to win.
French athletes Fabien Lamirault and Julien Michaud were both in serious road accidents when they were teenagers that left them with quadraplegia. The two men compete using wheelchairs; Michaud was only able to close his right hand into a fist again after multiple surgeries.
Red-haired and stocky, 44-year-old Lamirault was one of five para athletes chosen to light the Olympic Cauldron at the Opening Ceremony on Wednesday. Lamirault is the favourite tonight, having won two gold medals apiece at the Rio and Tokyo Games in the individual and team events. Two years ago, he won his third world championship. From the moment he enters South Paris Arena, the crowd doesn't stop screaming.
It's been a rough start to the night for the local fans. Frenchmen Matéo Bohéas and Thomas Bouvais fell early in the evening against Brazil, beaten 3-1 by the imposing Claudio Massad and his partner Luis Filipe Manara.
Manara stalks around the table with a wary energy, never settled. When the win comes, he leaps onto Massad's bear-like back before flinging himself into his coach's arms, finally collapsing theatrically onto the floor while his partner pats his chest as if searching for a heartbeat. It's an impressive performance to round off their impressive performance, and delivered with such infectious joy that even the partisan crowd seems won over.
Speaking to reporters afterwards, Bohéas was distraught. His eyes stared off past the somber press pack as though still fixed on the table he'd just walked away from.
“Honestly, it was horrible,” he said. “It was the worst match of my life.”
“There were two or three bad choices, two or three mistakes and that put me in a bit of a negative spirit that I couldn’t get out of,” he said.
By the time Lamirault and Michaud enter the stadium, the crowd is hungry for a win. It's the semi-finals – if they win this match today, they could win gold tomorrow. On the other side of the table is the South Korean team, Jang Yeongjin and Park Sung-Joo.
The game is frenetic. The four players are more or less fixed in place while the ball is in motion – only their right arm moves like a fencer's, darting, parrying, slashing down with deft precision.
The Koreans are too good. Four sets later, the game is over 3-1.
Still, Lamirault is stoic.
“The highest expectations I have are my own,” he said. “I have my objectives, I have my expectations and they’re higher than what other people can say, so what people say doesn’t bother me.”
The 44-year-old is still hoping to win gold in the individual event next week.
“I’m going to turn the page once I get up on that podium on August 31," he said. "For now, I’m going to make the most of, not the fact that we lost the semi-finals but that we won the bronze medal. So I’ll try to keep thinking of that.”
The main action of the night brings two gold-medal matches – one pitting China against Germany in the women's doubles, the other China against South Korea. This is not entirely surprising. China won more than half the medal events in para table tennis in Tokyo, and emerged with the most medals overall in every Paralympics since Athens in 2004.
To be blunt, it's not even close – the People's Republic won 96 gold medals in Tokyo during the pandemic, more than double that of the runner-up, Great Britain.
Tonight, they show the crowd why. Nineteen-year-old Huang Wenjuang and 16-year-old Jin Yucheng beat their German rivals 3-1 in a little over half an hour. In the next match, this time in wheelchairs, the Koreans also fell 3-1, outplayed by Liu Jing and Xue Juan in front of an increasingly empty arena.
And it is starting to feel a little empty – the German fans, despondent, have filed out of the stadium, leaving row after row of vacant seats in their wake. But a few loyal supporters are still clutching Chinese and Korean flags, and the French don't need much of an excuse to make some noise.
As the Korean pair wins a set off the Chinese, pushing them into a tense fourth exchange, the stands start to roar with the stamp of countless shoes on metal. The last set of the night is hard-fought – as the ping pong ball goes skittering off the other end of the table for the final time, the arena fills with a sound like rising thunder.
