GUYANESE female table tennis champion Chelsea Edghill will commence her campaign for possible qualification to the 2024 Paris Olympic Games, when she competes at the ITTF Americas Pan American qualification event being held from May 14 to 18 in Lima, Peru.
Edghill became the first table tennis player from Guyana and the first female player from the English-speaking Caribbean to qualify and to compete at the Olympic Games, when she participated in the 2020 Tokyo Games.
The qualification events will see the region’s best male and female stars vying for four spots.
There will be two individual events: Men’s Singles and Women’s Singles.
Four (4) men and four (4) women will qualify for the Paris 2024 Olympic Games.
The tournament will consist of two stages; each will have two knockout (KO) draws.
All singles matches will be the best of seven games.
Draw Seeding for Stage One will be done according to the latest available World Ranking, Separation by ranking and by association will be applied.
Seeding for Stage Two will be based firstly on the results of Stage One and secondly on World Ranking – i.e. losing finalists will receive priority over losing semi-finalists. The two losers in the finals of KO1 and KO2 will be seeds one and two.
The competition is also a precursor for candidates eligible for tripartite selection for which Chelsea is a candidate.
In round one of the draws of the first qualification, Edghill is scheduled to play against Venezuela’s Roxy Gonzalez
National prodigy Pan-American qualifier and former Caribbean champion Shemar Britton will be unavoidably absent for the qualification event, owing to exams for which he is completing final year studies at the Hugh Wooding Law school.
Britton was seeded 19th among men and is a tripartite candidate, having qualified for the Pan Am Games through solid performances in region competitions