Oh to be young again. Remember how simple and free of responsibility life was at 11, long before the agonizing monotony of adulthood and its maddening carousel of house payments and rush-hour traffic jams? A time when all we had to worry about was recess (back when I was a kickball legend), Nickelodeon and what Mom packed for lunch (Dunkaroos and Pacific Cooler Capri Sun were every fifth-grader’s dream). Or in the case of Syrian table tennis prodigy Hend Zaza, qualifying for the Olympics.
The world’s 155th-ranked table tennis player is headed to Japan, punching her ticket to the 2020 Games by toppling Lebanon’s Mariana Sahakian (31 years Zaza’s senior) in last week’s Olympic qualifying tournament in Amman, Jordan. Zaza, who turned 11 on January 1, outlasted Sahakian in a 4-3 nail-biter to earn West Asia’s Olympic bid in the final, which came a day after besting Sewar Abuyaman of Jordan in a lopsided 4-1 affair.
Not only is Zaza the youngest competitor in this year’s field—that distinction had previously been held by British skateboarder Sky Brown, who turns 12 in July—but she now stands as the fifth-youngest Olympian on record, according to The Guardian. In addition to being the Games’ youngest participant since Romanian figure skater Beatrice Hustiu competed as an 11-year-old in 1968 (props to OlyMadMen for dropping that knowledge bomb on us), Zaza is also the first Syrian to qualify in the table tennis discipline.
You can see the Syrian wunderkind in action when the women’s Olympic singles tournament gets underway on July 25 with the final scheduled for July 30 in Tokyo. This year’s Games should have no shortage of compelling plot lines but we’ll certainly be keeping an eye out for Zaza, who could be the most exciting name in table tennis since Forrest Gump's heyday in the '70s.
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