Table tennis is the game of the youth club and the hostel, the campsite and the school gym, the park and the prison. It is also played by elite athletes with rubber wrists and quicksilver reflexes, like 14-year-old British schoolgirl Bly Twomey. (Though, it turns out, elite athletes or not, they still have to crawl under the table to pick up errant balls.)
Twomey, the fourth seed, already had a bronze medal, with Fliss Pickard in the WD14 doubles last Thursday, when she walked out for her WS7 singles semi-final against the seventh seed, Turkey’s Kübra Korkut on Thursday.
A curtain of light brown hair hanging round her face, Twomey charged into an early two-set lead, nimble and dynamic. But Korkut found her mojo and took the next three sets on the trot in a 21-minute burst to win 9-11, 7-11, 11-6, 11-5, 11-5.
Twomey would have to settle for another bronze. “It’s an amazing experience,” she said. “It gives me a lot of hope to know I’m the same level as them.”
There was a huge contingent from the Brighton Table Tennis club to support their home players, Twomey and Will Bayley – formerly of Strictly Come Dancing and a silver medallist at Tokyo – who plays in the MS7 semi-finals on Friday. “We love you Bly, we do,” they chanted, bringing a touch of the football stadium to the South Paris Arena.
The director of the club, Tim Holtam, was watching with 35 members and another 100 were due to arrive on Thursday afternoon, many of them children in foster care and children who have never left the country before, able to come because of funding. “It’s an amazing community,” he said. “And we’re trying to put a silver lining on it. We didn’t want her to win because we want to extend the party to LA in four years.”
Twomey first went to the club at Easter 2021, to a multi-sport camp run thanks to the Holiday Activities and Food programme inspired by Marcus Rashford. “She picked up a bat and it was perfect timing as Will was at the club full time after Tokyo. He has guided her and showed her how to play,” said Holtam.
“She’s a category seven athlete and there has never been a player in class seven involved in able-bodied table tennis – she’s No 2 in England in the able-bodied under 14s. She’s the youngest ever British para table tennis player, the youngest medallist anywhere in the world. We are so proud of her.”
Twomey was born with cerebral palsy and has talked about how table tennis has given her confidence. Her identical twin, Ellis, watching from the stands with their cousins, agreed. “I feel very proud of her. She’s become a lot more confident and happy about her disability. She used to be quite sad and think of herself as not as good as other people, but now she’s a champion.”
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As Twomey and Korkut’s match was under way, other games took place on other tables where players in wheelchairs, players with prosthetic limbs and players with one arm whipped the ball from corner to corner.
The British Para Table Tennis’s Adele Stach-Kevitz wants to spread the word: “I’d love to have the problem of too many athletes to choose from. At the moment we have classifications where we have no athletes. In the disability space there may be people who think they are too disabled to enjoy a sport, it’s really not the case.”