London schoolgirl wins place at Commonwealth Games ping pong tables

 
Rising star: Tin-Tin Ho with her father Charles and mother Rita

A London schoolgirl today told how her father’s dream of encouraging her to become a table tennis champion has seen her selected for the Commonwealth Games at the age of 15.

Tin-Tin Ho, from Bayswater, began playing at five and is one of the youngest members of the Team England squad, after being inspired by her “tiger father” Charles Ho.

“I’m really happy and excited,” she told the Standard. “It will be my first Games. It will be a really good experience. I have never competed in a multi-sport event before.”

Tin-Tin, who attends the City of London School for Girls, in Barbican, is ranked No 3 in England and 376 in the world in a sport dominated by players from China and, in the Commonwealth, by Singapore, Malaysia and India. But she is the most active player in the world, competing in 126 matches last year.

Her father played for Hong Kong and also taught her elder brother, Ping, 20, now studying law at King’s College London, to play. He named her Tin-Tin to match the initials of table tennis — and had considered calling her Pong.

Mr Ho, an accountant, said there was “no surprise” at his daughter’s selection for the Games. “I’m very confident in her performance,” he said. “She is very good. She deserves her position. I have given her the techniques, the encouragement is from her mother. Her mother has done a very good job. I was a ‘tiger father’, very strict.” Her mother Rita said: “I’m very proud. I’m very happy.”

Tin-Tin trains two hours a day, six days a week with her brother and father and at Morpeth school table tennis club in Bethnal Green. “When I come back from school I train, and then I will do my homework,” she said. She takes her GCSEs next year.

She admitted there had been times when she struggled to match her father’s enthusiasm for table tennis. “He managed to encourage me to still carry on,” she said. She first represented her country aged eight.

Tin-Tin will play singles, doubles, mixed doubles and in the team event, in which England’s women came fourth in Delhi in 2010. “Hopefully as a team we can get a medal, seeing as last time we were so close,” she said. “In singles I don’t really know — I just want to enjoy it and get as far as I can.”

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