Polio-hit table tennis star finally boards the Asian Games flight

For 14 long years, Abdullah Jan has been Pakistan’s most consistent table tennis champion in the Paralympic arena, and for 14 years the same cruel script has repeated itself. Selected for the national team, packed and ready, only to be told at the last moment that he has to arrange the money for his trip.

This time the script has changed.

The 27-year-old from Peshawar, whose left leg was permanently affected by polio when he was just one year old, has finally secured official sponsorship through the Pakistan Sports Board and the National Paralympic Committee. He will represent Pakistan at the Asian Games in Japan, a moment he has waited for since he first lifted gold as a schoolboy.

“I met Abdullah in 2014 when he won gold at the National Paralympic Games in Peshawar. He was just a matric student and had no proper coaching,” recalls his coach, Mian Absar Ali. “We brought him to the Peshawar Sports Complex and started training him. Since then he has been national champion every year. Every single time he was selected for foreign events, his name was dropped because he could not afford the airfare.”

Abdullah’s life is a daily balancing act between survival and ambition. By profession he is a tailor master. Each morning he walks to a small shop, stitches two suits, and earns Rs300 per suit. By afternoon he is at the sports complex, training for hours. His father sells vegetables on the street. The family’s total monthly income is modest; Abdullah’s own earnings from tailoring come to about Rs18,000, almost all of which disappears into the sport.

“People think table tennis is cheap. It is not,” he says quietly. “A proper customised racket costs Rs75,000. You need two. The balls cost Rs300 each and last only a day. My daily transport alone is Rs250.”

He first picked up a racket in 2013 at the Special Education School in Hayatabad. The sports in-charge forced the shy teenager to represent Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa at the 2014 National Paralympic Games. He returned with gold. The medals kept coming. The international opportunities did not.

In 2023, he missed the Asian Games in China for the same reason, no sponsorship. This year a training camp organised by Coach Absar saw the players practising eight hours a day in two punishing sessions. The difference is that, for once, the ticket is paid for.

Yet even national glory brings little reward. A gold medal at the National Paralympic Games carries a cash prize of just Rs5,000. Recently Abdullah applied for a coach’s job on daily wages and was rejected. He does not hide his disappointment.

“I only ask that the provincial government support talented players like us,” he says. “We work hard. We win. But without sponsorship we remain stuck at the border.”

For now, the border has opened. A young man who stitches clothes by morning and trains until evening will finally step onto the biggest stage of his career, not as a charity case, but as a 14-time national champion who simply refused to quit.