Tokyo Olympics: Asian Americans form the U.S. table tennis team

U.S. OLYMPICS TEAM

Kanak Jha, 21, is the top-ranked U.S. table tennis player.

No other Olympic sport has a greater Asian American presence than table tennis. All six members and the two alternates are Asian Americans.

The highest-ranked player is 21-year old Kanak Jha, ranked No. 25 in the world. Among the women, Lilly Zhang is ranked No. 28. Both were on the U.S. team in Rio de Janeiro in 2016.

Other members of the U.S. Olympic team are:

• Juan Liu
• Huijing Wang
• Nikhil Kumar
• Xin Zhou
• Alternates - Chen Wang & Yijun Feng

No American has ever won an Olympic medal in the sport dominated by China but both Zhang and Jha earned Youth Olympic bronze medals.

“The U.S has never been very strong in table tennis, so for me to win a medal for the U.S. is amazing," said Jha.

“For me and Lily to both win a medal shows, that the U.S. is slowly getting better and can hopefully do well at the senior level in the future.”

U.S. TABLE TENNIS

The United States table tennis team members and their coaches will compete at the Tokyo Olympics.

Kumar, 17, is the youngest member of the team. He became the first American born in in this century to qualify for an Olympics. 

Wang, 39, is set to become the second-oldest woman U.S. Olympic table tennis player since it was added to the program in 1988. Liu is a former Chinese national team player who became a U.S. citizen in 2016, according to TeamUSA.org.

While Jha and Zhang are the highest ranked U.S. players, Liu may be the surprise for the U.S. team.

Liu, who became a citizen of the U.S. in 2016 and is co-owner of the New York Indoor Sports Club in College Point, has become one of the most dominant players in the U.S. She won both the national championship and US Open title in 2018, and reached the US Open semifinals in 2019. She has not lost to a U.S. woman, and she helped the U.S. defeat Canada last year to lock down a team quota spot for Tokyo.

While she was still in China, Liu played in the Super League for almost 10 years. Now, in New York, it’s a balance of table tennis and family. She didn’t even know until last year whether she would be eligible for the Olympics as a U.S. athlete.

“The high level of competition and training really have helped me a lot in recovering my physical condition and training technique, but the game and the skills have developed since the time when I was in the national team in China, so I still have to work on many things,” Liu said.

2021 OLYMPICS: Nathan Adrian won't be going to Tokyo but 3 AAPI swimmers make the team

Torri Huske has a chance to win mulitple medas at the Olympics.

The United States is sending one of its youngest swimming teams to the Tokyo Olympics later this month. The three Asian Americans on the U.S. team are all under 20.

As the youthful swimmers will be heading to the Olympics for the first time, one of the veteran swimmers, popular Nathan Adrian, 32, who has been to four Olympics, won't be making the trip, failing to qualify in his events, the 100m and 50m freestyle. This will be the first time since 2004 that Adrian will be absent from the U.S. Olympic team.

Torri Huske, 18, missed her high school graduation to compete at trials this June. But it was worth it with a chance to win multiple medals later this month.

The Chinese American Arlington, Virginia resident and Yorktown High School senior had just won the finals of the women’s 100-meter butterfly at the U.S. Olympic Team Trials with a time of 55.66 seconds, breaking her own American record set a day earlier.

She will also be competing in the 50-, 100- and 200-meter freestyle races at the Olympic trials this week, as well as the 200-meter individual medley, according to the Washington Post.

The Stanford-bound Huske is one of several first-time Olympians who benefited from the postponed Olympic Games. A pair of Las Vegas-based teens will also be heading to Tokyo.

Erica Sullivan will swim the 1,500 meter freestyle at the Olympics.

Japanese American Erica Sullivan made her mark in the 1,500 freestyle at trials, staying with Katie Ledecky for the first half of the race, then touching the wall in second place just over 10 seconds behind Ledecky — and beating her open water idols, Haley Anderson and Ashley Twichell, who finished the 1,500 in fourth and fifth, respectively.

To achieve her Olympic dream, Sullivan, 20, had to overcome anxiety, panic attacks, depression and post-traumatic stress disorder in the past few years. From Las Vegas, Nevada, Sullivan postponed college in 2018 and will attend the University of Texas after the Tokyo Games.

At age 16, Bella Sims will be one of the youngest members of the U.S. Swim Team.

Fresh from her sophomore year in high school, Filipino American Bella Sims made her first Olympic team as a prelim swimmer in the 4x200 freestyle relay. The 16-year-old only started training and competitive racing five years ago. Before that, she was only taking swim lessons.

Like teammate Erica Sullivan, Sims trains with the Sandpipers of Nevada. In the 200 freestyle, Sims dropped 2.5 seconds off her personal best, finishing fifth and scoring a relay prelim spot, meaning she will compete in the preliminaries but give up her spot if the relay team makes it to the finals.

Nathan Adrian's comeback after contracting testicular cancer two and one-half years ago would have been a compelling story for media and the slew of products that he endorses. He returned to training in 2019. The Bremerton, Washington resident failed to make the finals in his primary event, the 100m freestyle. He needed to finish in the top eight to make the finals. His time in the prelims was good enough for 13th.

In the 50m freestyle finals, the Chinese American swimmer just missed making the team by finishing 3rd. The top two spots made the team.

“If I was to commit to anything right now, it would really, genuinely mean nothing,” said Adrian, who already has eight medals to his credit. The new father was disappointed but not broken up about not making the Olympic team. “What I will commit to doing is taking a good break, letting my body, letting my mind just recover.”

After failing to qualify, Adrian tweeted the following:

2021 OLYMPICS: Medals expected with first Hmong American gymnast in the U.S. women's team

TEAM USA

Olympian Sunisa Lee on the balance beam.

To no one's surprise, Simone Biles, a once-in-a-century athlete, dominated the gymnastic tryouts over the weekend, but coming in a strong second is the first Hmong American to make the U.S. Olympic team.

Sunisa Lee, 18, did well enough in all the events to raise the possibility of the American squad winning the gold and silver medals at the Tokyo Olympics next month with the gold, presumably going to Biles, the G.O.A.T. in women's gymnastics.

The University of Auburn-bound Lee locked up one of the two guaranteed spots for the team with her second-place finish in the two-day event. And it took an uncharacteristically off-night for Biles – with an error on uneven bars and a fall on balance beam -- for Lee to hold the advantage in those two events.

Besides being the first Hmong American to reach such prominence in the sport, the road to making the Olympic team has not been easy for Lee from St. Paul, Minnesota.

Lee’s life turned upside down right as her elite gymnastics career was taking off. Just days before heading to her first senior U.S. championships in 2019, Lee’s dad, John, became partially paralyzed after falling from a ladder. The Minnesota native decided to still compete, and all she did was finish as runner-up to Biles. 

Lee has since gone on to win a full slate of world championships medals — gold with the team, silver on floor, bronze on uneven bars — before claiming another runner-up finish at the U.S. championships earlier this month.

The journey to get here has come with more hardship, though. While John Lee has made progress in his recovery, an aunt the gymnast was close with died of COVID-19. Two weeks later, her uncle died too. This all came as the Lee was grappling with the reality that the Tokyo Games she’d been working toward had been pushed back a year. 

“You don't think something like this would ever happen to you,” the gymnast who goes by Suni told the Minneapolis Star Tribune. “And when it did, it was like everything hit all at one time.”

RELATED: Korean American makes US Men's Gymnastic Team.

With her parents in the crowd at nationals and trials, Lee, 18, has looked the part of an Olympian. While recovering from an ankle injury earlier this year, Lee said she heard the whispers about whether she could be an all-arounder at the Olympics. So the future Auburn Tiger went out and posted the second best all-around scores at both nationals and the trials. 

While Lee could no doubt factor into the all-around in Tokyo, the event to really pay attention is the uneven bars, where she starts with a world-class 6.7 difficulty score and connects a seemingly never ending chain of skills like it’s no big deal. If she can hit that routine in Tokyo, Lee could come home with an individual gold medal along with the gold medal for the team competition, in which the U.S. is the favorite.

Besides Lee and Biles, the rest of the women's gymnastic squad were introduced following the conclusion of Sunday’s competition at the U.S. Olympic Team Trials in St. Louis. They also include Jordan Chiles and Grace McCallum. In addition, Jade Carey and MyKayla Skinner qualified for Tokyo as individuals.

TEAM USA

This year's women's gymnastic team might be better than the team that won the 2016 team title.

Waiting in the wings in case of injury or COVID-19 protocols, is Filipino American Emma Malabuyo, who was named one of the alternates. The UCLA-bound Texan finished in ninth place overall at the Trials. Her best events are vault, uneven bars and beam and her floor routine.

Chinese American Emily Lee, also competed at the Trials and finished 15th after she was unable to finish her final event due to an injury. 

Since winning the team silver medal at the 2008 Olympics in Beijing, the U.S. women are undefeated in the Olympic and world championships team competitions, a combined seven victories. The winning streak goes even longer in the individual all-around, with a U.S. woman having won every Olympic gold medal since Carly Patterson in 2004, and 10 of the 12 world titles during that span.

Asian American gymnasts in the running for the U.S. Women's Olympic team

Emma Matabuyo surprised at the U.S. Championships.

Two Asian Americans are among the gymnasts who might make the U.S. Women's Gymnastics Olympic Team.

There's Simon Biles' then, everybody else on the U.S. Women's Gymnastic Team that will compete in the Olympics this summer.

Biles, who does feats no one else can do on the competitive floor, is in a category all by herself, placing first in the U.S. Championships held last weekend.

While the Olympic team won't be announced until after the Olympic Trials being held June 24-27 in St. Louis, Missouri, barring injury, BIles is essentially a lock for the Tokyo Olympics.

In addition to winning a record-breaking seventh all-around national title at the 2021 U.S. Championships, Biles also extended her undefeated streak: she has won every all-around competition she’s entered since March 2013.

The remaining question is who will be joining her on the four-member Olympic team. 

Coming in the Championships' scoring is Suni Lee, which gives her a strong bet for the team. Lee was the only athlete not named “Simone Biles” to claim a national title at U.S. Championships. She posted the highest score on uneven bars and also finished second in the all-around, a particularly impressive achievement given that the 18-year-old Hmong American is currently coming back from a foot/Achilles injury.

“I think this is a really good confidence booster because I wasn’t even at my full potential on floor, and obviously my vault could have been a little better and today my bars was a little rough,” Lee said. “It definitely helps my confidence because I know I don’t have to be 100 percent to be in the top with Simone, so I’m really proud of myself.”

Jordan Chiles, who appears to be peaking at just the right time, rounds out the top three.

Filipino American gymnast Emma Malabuyo from Texas finished a surprising fourth. 

“Clearly Emma Malabuyo was super impressive,” high-performance team coordinator Tom Forster noted. “She came out of a very, very low position at the U.S. Classic, and it’s great to see her back in her international form that she was in a couple years ago since she’s wrestled with a couple injuries here and there. … There were a couple of surprises today but I’d say she was the best surprise that we weren’t expecting.”

In the top five is 18-year old Leanne Wong of Kansas. The University of Florida-bound gymnast's strongest event was her floor routine.

Besides Biles and Lee, the scores at the Championships or the trials won't necessarily provide a a cleaerfut choice for the team. The complicated selection process is mystifying for anyone outside of the world of gymnastics.

“The gymnast does not have to be an all-arounder,” Forster said of the additional, individual athlete. “Our goal is to provide our athletes with the most opportunities to win medals for themselves and for Team USA. We believe that we’re going to have our strongest all-arounders on the team. … Whoever is really stepping up and showing the best potential for winning a medal or medals will earn that [individual] spot.”