Natalia Partyka

Natalia Partyka was born in Gdańsk without a right hand or forearm. She started playing table tennis at seven because her older sister played, and her parents never treated her as someone who needed a different set of rules. She serves by balancing the ball in the crook of her right elbow and tossing it from there, and by her early teens she was beating boys in her club.

She went to the Sydney Paralympics in 2000 aged 11, the youngest competitor at those Games. Four years later, in Athens, she won the singles gold in her class at 15. Rather than settle into disability sport, she pushed into the able-bodied game as well, and in 2008 she qualified for the Beijing Olympics on merit. She was one of only two athletes that summer to compete at both the Olympics and Paralympics, winning her second Paralympic gold a few weeks after the Olympic tournament ended.

She did it again in London in 2012 and Rio in 2016, four Paralympic singles titles in succession alongside three Olympic appearances and a run of medals at the European Championships against able-bodied players.

She has said she dislikes being called inspirational and would rather be judged on whether she can beat the person on the other side of the table.