‘She’s a champion’: 14-year-old Bly Twomey wins hearts and a second bronze

Bly Twomey keeps her eye on the ball in her semi-final against Kübra Korkut of Turkey. Photograph: Tom Jenkins/The Guardian

Table tennis is the game of the youth club and the hostel, the campsite and the school gym, the park and the prison. It is also played by elite ­athletes with rubber wrists and ­quicksilver reflexes, like ­14-year-old British schoolgirl Bly Twomey. (Though, it turns out, elite athletes or not, they still have to crawl under the table to pick up errant balls.)

Twomey, the fourth seed, already had a bronze medal, with Fliss ­Pickard in the WD14 doubles last Thursday, when she walked out for her WS7 singles semi-final against the seventh seed, Turkey’s Kubra Korkuton Thursday.