Player wins double gold at deaf games

Oamaru woman Emma Paton won double table tennis gold at the Australian Deaf Games in Geelong....
Oamaru woman Emma Paton won double table tennis gold at the Australian Deaf Games in Geelong. Photo by Ben Guild.
Emma Paton looks like a sweet, innocent young blonde woman, but watch out when she faces you across the table tennis table.

In her natural environment - poised over a table tennis table in her parents' garage - the 20-year-old is revealed as something else.

She becomes an assertive, aggressive hustler without a conscience and with a penchant for blood.

It was no doubt those qualities that helped earned her double table tennis gold as part of the 12-strong Deaf Sports Federation of New Zealand team that competed at the Australian Deaf Games in Geelong in January, attended by more than 800 athletes from Australia, New Zealand, Fiji and Samoa.

Having minimal game time in her off-season, with soaring temperatures in the Geelong Table Tennis Stadium, and without the aid of her two speech processors required under tournament rules, the former Waitaki Girls' High School pupil still prevailed.

She arrived two days before the tournament started to adjust to the heat - the ball travels faster off the bat's rubber through hot air - before dropping only a handful of games on the way to the women's singles final.

Trailing two games to none and down three match points in the third game against Leslie Noonan of New South Wales, Paton rallied, and to the delight of the New Zealand contingent won (9-11, 6-11, 14-12, 11-3, 11-7).

Her mixed doubles victory with Australian partner Michael Louey, proved more straightforward, with the pair winning the final 3-0 after going through the earlier rounds unbeaten.

The double triumph represents a remarkable achievement for the member of the Otago women's team, who only began playing the sport seriously eight months before cutting her teeth playing for New Zealand at the 2009 Deaf Olympics in Taipei.

She returned from that trip winless, but loved competing against and befriending other hearing-impaired athletes.

Paton, who received her second cochlear ear implant at the beginning of 2011 which helps her better locate the direction from which sounds come, paid tribute to fellow players Ben Duffy and Christian Kasper, who provided her with assistance and training.

Paton is employed part-time as an office worker at Oamaru-based Milligans Food Group, and has her sights firmly set on the next Australian Deaf Games to be held in Adelaide in 2016, as table tennis is not played at the New Zealand Deaf Games.

Until then, she will lie in wait in her garage with her 10-strong arsenal of serves, spending hours preparing for human flesh by slapping ball after ball fired by her table tennis robot, awaiting the next confident contestant to take her on.

- ben.guild@odt.co.nz

 

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