Tokyo Olympics: Minnie Soo fulfils childhood dream with table tennis team bronze
- Soo showed talent at the age of six, winning the ‘Most Potential Female Player’ award at the Hang Seng Academy
- The 23-year-old helped Hong Kong create history by winning both her matches in bronze medal play-off against Germany
Table tennis star Minnie Soo Wai-yam’s journey from a precocious two-year-old to Olympic heroine at the recent Tokyo Games was a fulfilment of a dream that was a long time in the making.
Soo thrilled Hong Kong fans when she won both her matches to steer Hong Kong past Germany 3-1 in the Olympic bronze medal meeting this month. At 23, Soo is one of the younger members of the Hong Kong team but she belied her years to play a pivotal part in the city’s unexpected run to Olympic success.
Soo started playing table tennis at the age of just two and a half and by the time she was six, her dream of making it on the world stage began. The youngster was named the “Most Potential Female Player” at the Hang Seng Table Tennis Academy. Her mother, Wu Mei-chu, said Soo, who already trained two hours a day and four days a week, wanted to be a Hong Kong team member.
At 15, Soo turned to full-time training to focus on a professional career, giving up her studies at one of the best secondary schools in the city – the Diocesan Girls’ School.
After capturing a team bronze medal for Hong Kong at the 2015 Asian Championships, Soo, by then 17, set her ultimate goal of winning an Olympic medal in Tokyo. At 23, her Olympic medal dream was realised at the Tokyo Metropolitan Gymnasium.
“My father runs a table tennis training school after representing Hong Kong in the early 1990s and that’s why I started out in the sport so early,” said Hong Kong’s brightest new talent. “After training part-time for one or two years, I decided to commit to the sport full-time. Of course it was a big decision as I had to stop my studies which not many people would have done at such a young age.