Kanak Jha

Kanak Jha is an Indian-American table tennis player. He is a two-time Olympian, and the best male player in the United States by an indisputable margin, winning every single national title between 2016 and 2019 for a record four straight national titles. He has also had notable international wins against players like Uda Yukiya and Zhou Qihao.

He made his Olympic debut in Rio in 2016, competing in both singles and doubles. In the 2014 ITTF Men’s World Cup, Jha became the youngest ever to play in the World Cup at age 14. Two years later, he became the first athlete born in the 2000s to qualify for the U.S. Olympic Team. In the 2018 Summer Youth Olympics, he won a bronze medal in the boy's event and added bronze medals in mixed doubles and singles at the 2019 Pan American Games to his collection.

He was signed by the German Bundesliga team in Ochsenhausen in mid-2020 and continued to represent the United States at the Tokyo Olympics in the men's singles and team event in 2021. He spent a large amount of his final days training in the United States with his Olympic teammate at the 888 Table Tennis Center, a club for which he is an ambassador. At the Tokyo Olympics, Jha lost in the round of 64 to Russia's Kirill Skachkov, and Team USA lost to Sweden in the first round of the team event, with Jha scoring USA's lone victory over Mattias Falck.