Indian female table tennis player Manika Batra, who was the sole representative of India, ended her campaign at the ongoing WTT Star Contender 2026 Doha in Qatar after losing her quarter-finals match on Saturday, January 17.
Batra lost to world No. 5 Zhu Yuling of Macao in straight sets by 6-11, 5-11, 9-11 in a 23-minute match. Batra was the only Indian to qualify in the round of 16 after securing brilliant wins over U-19 defending World Champion Yu-Xuan Qin of China and 16th seed Lee Eunhye of South Korea.
In the pre-quarterfinals match, Zhu held her dominance over Batra in the first two games with a total of 11 points scored, making sure to give the defeat here. However, in the third game, Batra made a strong comeback by taking a 9-6 lead, but soon she lost her game to five straight points from Zhu.
Three Indian women’s singles players, including Ayhika Mukherjee, Swastika Ghosh, and Taneesha Kotech, had played the main draw, but they faced a first-round exit in their respective matches.
Meanwhile, in the men’s singles, Sathiyan Gnanasekaran, Manush Shah, and Manav Thakkar also faced defeats in the main draw matches on Wednesday, January 14, exiting in R64. Top-seeded Manush was recently crowned the men’s champion at the WTT Feeder Series in Vadodara.
On the other hand, Manav bowed out against world No. 5 Truls Moregardh of Sweden in a thrilling R16 battle in men’s singles by 4-11, 11-9, 8-11, 12-14. The hard-fought loss against Moregard ended his campaign in Doha.
Manika Batra’s achievements
Batra is a Commonwealth Games gold medallist, a two-time Olympian who has established herself among the notable names in the history of Indian table tennis. She won three gold medals at the 2016 South Asian Games, followed by her Olympic debut in Rio 2016. The following year, she made it to world no. 104 on the ITTF rankings, and with that, she became the highest-ranked Indian female table tennis player.
The same year, she, along with Mouma Das, created history as the first Indian table tennis duo to make it to the quarter-finals of the World Table Tennis Championships. In the Tokyo 2020 Games, she then became the first Indian female table tennis player to qualify in round of 32 in the women’s singles event at the Olympics. In the 2024 Saudi Smash, Batra defeated former champion and world No. 2 Wang Manyu of the People’s Republic of China and later qualified in the quarter-finals of the event.
