PLEASANTON — The Alameda County Fairgrounds this weekend is hosting a Major League Table Tennis tournament, featuring the Bay Area Blasters and four-time Olympian and Palo Alto’s own Lily Zhang.
Zhang and the Blasters will compete against teams from across the U.S., hailing from New Jersey, Texas, the Carolinas and more. Competitors on the teams also represent other countries where the sport is popular, including China, the Philippines, Japan and Sweden.
Zhang, who grew up playing table tennis as a kid in a laundry room at Stanford where her father worked as a professor, competed in her fourth Olympics in Paris last year, where she reached the top 16 players in the world for women’s singles.
She defeated Brazil’s Bruna Takahashi, before being eliminated by South Korea’s Shin Yubin.
Zhang is also a six-time U.S. National Champion and alumna of University of California, Berkeley. She first competed in the Olympics at age 16 in the 2012 London games, then again in 2016 in Rio de Janeiro and again in 2020 at the Tokyo games. Zhang is the first ever American-born woman in table tennis to compete in four Olympic games.
The Blasters are scheduled to compete Friday at 7 p.m. against the Princeton Revolution, Saturday at 7 p.m. against the Carolina Gold Rush and at 2 p.m. on Sunday against the Texas Smash.
