Top seed Gao Ning of Singapore proved his class to score a convincing 4-1 victory at the Indian Open Table Tennis Championship.
India's campaign at the China Open Super Series Table Tennis ended after Neha Aggarwal lost to Viktoria Pavlovich 0-4 in the women's singles in Changchun, on Friday.
The Indian ace was beaten in the men's singles semi-finals of the Commonwealth Table Tennis Championships.
London Olympics quarter-finalist P Kashyap eked out a hard-fought victory over Chinese qualifier Huan Gao to enter the second round, on a reasonably good day for the Indian shuttlers, at the Li Ning China Masters badminton tournament in Changzhou, on Wednesday. The eighth-seeded Kashyap, a Commonwealth Games bronze-medallist, staved off a stiff challenge from Gao to prevail 21-13, 14-21, 21-19 in 78 minutes.
Indian shuttler Sai Praneeth failed to make it to the main draw of the Li Ning China Masters. He went down fighting to Huan Gao of China in the qualification round of the men's singles at Changzhou on Tuesday. Huan will take on London Olympics quarter-finalist and Commonwealth Games bronze-medallist P Kashyap of India on Wednesday.
Top seed Gao Ning will not take Indian table tennis' biggest hope Achanta Sharath Kamal lightly in case the two paddlers come face to face in the singles event of the Commonwealth Games.Sharath has, in the past, given the Singapore-based paddler some tough competitions, and Gao is wary of that.
Gao Ning was India's nemesis as Olympian Achanta Sharath Kamal and his compatriots went down to Singapore 1-3 and finished runners-up in the men's team event of the 18th Commonwealth Table Tennis Championship in Glasgow on Saturday. The Indian team, which put up brilliant efforts to notch seven consecutive wins and enter the final, failed to live up to expectations when it mattered most.
Sharath Kamal settled for a creditable sixth spot after going down against South Korean Kim Minseok in a thriller at the 28th Asian Cup table tennis tournament in Jaipur on Saturday.
Top Indian Achanta Sharath Kamal received a mauling from Dimitrij Ovtcharov in a lopsided semi-final and the German then downed Korean Seo Hyun Deok to lift the men's singles title in the ITTF Indian Open Pro Tour Table Tennis tournament, which concluded on Sunday.
Defeats in sports dominated by China at previous Olympics have left the country in an unfamiliar third place on the medals table, with some predicting that Rio 2016 could witness the lowest haul in two decades.
