India's Table Tennis star Manika Batra's father Girish Batra died on February 11 due to cardiac arrest. 65-year-old Girish Batra used to live in New Delhi along with star paddler Manika and wife Sushma Batra.
Manika Batra is India's Games gold medallist, a two-time Olympian and winner of multiple other honours. During the Tokyo Olympics 2020, she became the first women’s table tennis player from India to make it to the round of 32 in singles at an Olympics. Manika stole the limelight during the 2018 Commonwealth Games in Gold Coast, Australia where she clinched four medals, two of them gold.
Before that, Manika Batra had won three gold medals at the 2016 South Asian Games and made her Olympic debut at Rio 2016.
Recently Manika became the first Indian women's table tennis player to be included in the top 25 ranked women singles players in the world. In the latest world ranking released by the International Table Tennis Federation (ITTF), she achieved her career-best rank of 24 in singles events.
Her performance in the Saudi Smash 2024 Table Tennis tournament helped the paddler to improve her world ranking from 39 to 24. At the Saudi Smash event in Jeddah, she reached the quarter-final stage. She is the first Indian player to reach the quarterfinal round of a WTT Grand Smash event.