Teen prodigy Divyanshi spars with robot at home to hone TT skills

Teen prodigies in table tennis has almost exclusively been China’s domain so far, but then, all that may change soon thanks to Divyanshi Bhowmick, the 14-year-old from Mumbai who made waves as she ended a 36-year title drought for India by clinching the under-15 girls’ singles crown at the Asian Junior and Cadet Table Tennis Championships 2025 in Tashkent last week.

Divyanshi’s triumph, which saw her scalp three Chinese and a Japanese rival, made the Table Tennis Federation of India (TTFI) sit up as it announced a cash prize of Rs 5 lakh on Saturday. “This is a well-deserved incentive for a young athlete who accomplished a monumental feat on her maiden appearance — defeating three Chinese and a Japanese player en route to the title,” TTFI president Meghna Ahlawat said.

There is always a big 'if' during the leap from cadet or junior level to senior in any sport, but the curiosity of Indian media was heightened at the news of the pocket-sized Divyanshi overcoming China’s Zhu Qihui 4-2 in a hard-fought final that lasted nearly an hour. It seems her case is not a flash in the pan as barely a few months back, she made her senior debut at the WTT Star Contender event in Chennai at the age of 14 and shocked world no. 64 and Olympian Giorgia Piccolin of Italy in first round. 

Two years earlier in 2023, Divyanshi won a doubles silver medal at the 2023 ITTF World Youth Championships, along with WTT Contender Youth titles in the U13, U15 and U17 categories.

Speaking to Indian Express, Kamlesh Mehta, the multiple former national champion and now TTFI secretary, tried to put Divyanshi’s Asian crown in perspective. “It’s a very important performance. She has beaten three Chinese players and the player whom she beat in the semifinals (Liu Ziling), had beaten her three times before. That player is very strong and also very comfortable with the style of play, the rubber that Bhowmick plays with. That itself speaks volume about her achievement.”

Divyanshi, a resident of Kandivali in Mumbai, was around nine when her father Rahul Bhowmick decided to pull out all stops to push his daughter's quest for excellence. First came a TT board during Covid so she could hit at home and then, in what’s certainly a rarity in India, a Power Pong Omega Robot to help develop Divyanshi’s game. Both are major investments but the results have been showing early on.

“One of the things that I noticed about the success of Chinese TT players was their ball control. We used the robot to work on specific scenarios where she was having trouble. You can programme the robot to a high-spin, high-loop setting and then hit a thousand such balls in practice. The key was to repeat this time and again until she perfected it,” Rahul said in a recent interview.

The results have been encouraging and late last year, Divyanshi was signed up by Dani Sports Foundation, owners of Ultimate Table Tennis (UTT) who were scouting U-13 table tennis players. She was part of the Junior UTT in Ahmedabad in May — catching eyes and winning matches — until the 'Chinese coup' in Taskhent.