Sofia Polcanova

Moldovan-Austrian table tennis player Sofia Polcanova is a World Tour gold medal winner and a European Championships doubles finalist. Polcanova is a left-handed player who employs a shakehand grip, and has represented the clubs Askö Froschberg and Kinoshita Abyell Kanagawa, as well as the Austrian national team.

Polcanova began competing at cadet level, where she climbed into the Top 20 in her age group worldwide. She continued to rank highly at junior level, before becoming the world No. 7 under-21 player thanks to a string of impressive finishes on the World Tour. In 2015, she achieved her first major international victory when she took the women’s doubles title at the Hungarian Open in Budapest alongside teammate Amelie Solja. She has since reached the latter stages of several World Tour events, including at the Czech Open, Austrian Open and Bulgarian Open.

Polcanova made her Olympic debut at the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, where she competed in the women’s singles and women’s team events, reaching the quarter-finals of the latter. At the 2018 ITTF European Championships in Alicante, Polcanova enjoyed a particularly strong showing, scoring a trio of medals. She took home a bronze in the hotly-contested women’s singles event, while claiming a pair of silvers – in the women’s doubles alongside Russia’s Yana Noskova, and in the mixed doubles with fellow Austrian Stefan Fegerl. In 2019, she would place third at the European Top 16 Cup in Montreux, and would go on to repeat her performance at the elite tournament the following year.