Olympic Table Tennis Draws Released
Update: We have posted brackets and results for starting from the main draw (final 48) onward for both the men’s singles and women’s singles events. Check out our recaps of selected matches on Day 2 and onwards on our Olympic coverage page.
WTT posted the following images on their Instagram story with the full draws for the mixed doubles and team events and the top 16 seeds in the singles events at the Tokyo Olympics:
As a reminder, here are the seedings for each of the events:
Here is the tier list of China’s perceived biggest rivals in the singles and team events:
On the men’s singles side, China catches a break as their two biggest perceived rivals, Lin Yun-Ju and Tomokazu Harimoto, end up in the same quarter-final bracket. Ma Long in particular must be pleased with his draw as Fan Zhendong draws the winner between Lin and Harimoto.
On the women’s singles side, Sun Yingsha draws Mima Ito, the sole tier 1 rival, in her semi-final bracket, giving Chen Meng a significantly easier path to the finals than her teammate.
Ito should be pleased that she draws Sun Yingsha instead of Chen Meng, who has had a more dominant last couple years and better head-to-head record against Ito compared to Sun. On the other hand Harimoto is perhaps the biggest loser of the men’s singles draw as he draws Lin in the quarter-final draw, who at least in the eyes of China appears to be the strongest low seed in the tournament, and then draws top seed Fan Zhendong, whom Harimoto has a weaker head-to-head record against compared to Ma Long, in the semi-finals.
Among the lower seeds, the biggest winners are essentially those who drew Hugo Calderano and Cheng I-Ching in their semi-final group, who are quite clearly a step below the other top four seeds (particularly Cheng). In particular, in the round-of-16, Bernadette Szocs gets a chance to repeat her upset in WTT Doha over Cheng. Dimitrij Ovtcharov also gets a stab at Hugo Calderano in a potential quarter-finals match-up.
After Jang Woojin blew a perfect chance at WTT Doha enter the top eight and improve his odds of getting a good draw, the odds ended up being in his favor as he draws virtually an ideal draw in Calderano’s part of the bracket far away from the other Asian powerhouses. Similarly, after failing to capitalize on Cheng I-Ching’s poor performance and break into the top four at WTT Doha, Kasumi Ishikawa catches a break as she ends up in the same semi-finals slot in Cheng I-Ching.
An account affiliated Hugo Calderano has also published the draw for the earlier rounds:
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