Andre Ho on Fast Track for Table Tennis Success
December 10, 2009

Andre Ho - 2009 Chile Junior & Cadet Open Photo by courtesy of ITTF (by Cristian Larrain)

Courtesy of Richmond News By Mark Booth December 09, 2009 - As Canada's top up-and-coming table tennis player, Andre Ho is in the fast lane for success and he is showing no signs of slowing down. Originally pegged as a 2016 Olympic hopeful the goals keep changing for this 17-year-old rising star from Richmond.

"Our hope for Andre is to be competing at the international level," said Dr. Chandra Madhosingh, who oversees player development for the B.C. Table Tennis Association. "At the rate he is improving, he is ahead of schedule and is now looking at 2012 (Summer Olympic Games) in London.

"He will be a national champion and I'm 99 per cent certain he will represent Canada at the Olympics one day."

Ho has already established himself among the top junior players in the world. He was sixth at the recent Pan American Junior Championships in Chile and was the lone North American to qualify for 16-player World Junior Championships in Tokyo.

Now he's poised to make an impact at the open men's level, starting off by making the Canadian team for the 2010 Commonwealth Games in Delhi.

Ho has taken the Owen Hargreaves' path to success.

Hargreaves is the Calgary-born soccer player who left for Europe when he was eight to play for the Mayern Munich junior program in Germany. He would eventually turn pro and now plays for Manchester United.

Ho still lives in Richmond but is frequently traveling to regions of the world where the caliber of table tennis is much higher than Canada.

"When I was 10, I started to go to other places in the world for training," explained Ho. "There were training camps in Portugal and China. It was a really good experience, especially when I was young. I got to see a lot of things.

"Our sport really counts on (the quality of) our opponents. The higher the level is, the more it pushes us. We need to compare ourselves to an international world class level if we want to compete for Olympic and World Championship medals."

Technically, Ho is a Grade 12 student at Cambie secondary but his constant travel means much of his homework and studying is done through correspondence. He was only home from Chile for a couple of weeks before heading to Baltimore for the North American Team Championships.

His passion for the game developed through spending hours in the basement playing against his father. Now he is a carded athlete although the monthly funding he receives hardly covers his travel expenses. The bulk of his financial support comes from his family -- including his mom Amelia who also happens to be the president of the B.C. Table Tennis Association and owns the Canada International Table Tennis Institute on Bridgeport Road.

That's where Andre spends over 20 hours a week training and pushing himself every day.

"You have to put in the effort and hard work, making sure you are using your time wisely," he said. "There is quality and quantity and both are really important in our sport. You need both and also a little bit of luck.

"I'm played in the Chile Junior Open and the Pan Ams right after so that was (competing) seven days in a row and I was satisfied with my finish. "I qualified for the Worlds with the tournament points I earned. To be paired up with the best in the world and do pretty well was quite satisfying."