A Missing Country Code on a Form Cost Kanak Jha 17 Months of His Career. Now, He’s Back at the Olympics

The U.S. table tennis player was banned for a drug-test violation and had to qualify for Paris through two trials. The reason for his suspension will surprise you.

The U.S.'s Kanak Jah upset Korea's Cho Dae-seong on Sunday. / Steph Chambers/Getty Images

PARIS — Being an Olympian can be thrilling and exhausting, joyful and heartbreaking, patriotic and ego-stroking, and for a few, it can even be lucrative, but at some point, for almost every athlete here, it is lonely. Hours in the pool or the track or on a bike or a horse; months of ailing and rehabbing and pushing and waiting; days filled with car drives and train rides and transoceanic flights.

Kanak Jha knows lonely. He knows it quite well. At age 15, he left California for Sweden while he was still in high school to chase his table-tennis dream—his sister, Prachi, went with him—and he eventually settled in Germany. At 16, he qualified for the Rio Olympics in 2016, as the youngest member of Team USA, but lost early. Five years later, he competed in Tokyo, and again lost early. He was on track to make it to the Games for a third time when he got suspended, in March 2023, for a drug-testing violation.

Jha’s offense?

He failed to write +1 next to his U.S. phone number on a form.

When the tester tried to reach him, the call didn’t go through. Thus, he was banned for missing three drug tests and was suspended for one year by the United States Anti-Doping Agency (USADA).

Ultimately, Jha lost 17 months of his career. He was cut off from his source of income. He went home to Milpitas, Calif., and practiced, prepared and hoped. Finally, he was able to return to training and earned his spot on the U.S. team through two separate trials, since he was stripped of all of his ranking points after his time away from the sport. He started a GoFundme to pay his expenses and has brought in $12,623 as of this writing. He says “every dollar was spent in preparation for this Olympics.” And then on Saturday night he was alone again.

He was in his bed at the Olympic village, unable to sleep. He refused to give in and get up or look at his phone, figuring that even if he wasn’t snoozing, at least he was resting. In the end he got just “two or three hours” of sleep, and then he got up and had a big breakfast and went off to South Paris Arena 4 to be alone again.

They call it singles for a reason.

As Jha looked across the net at Korea’s Cho Dae-seong, the 15th seed in the Olympic tournament— most of the people in the stands weren’t just cheering for another player. They were cheering for another match.

Fans from Egypt screamed for Omar Assar.

Fans from Madagascar chanted “Fabio! Fabio!” for their man, Fabio Rakotoarimanana.

The only people who seemed to be focused on Jha and Cho were their families. Jha’s mom, dad, uncle and sister were all there. He thinks the last time they all saw him play in person “was probably 2016.”

In his third Olympics, Kanak Jha is using his past struggles to propel him in Paris. / JUNG YEON-JE/AFP/Getty Images

Jha was clearly pumped, but he didn’t want to be too pumped: “If you just go in wanting to just fight and yell, that's not how you're going to win. You need to be extremely tactical.” He lost the first game in the best-of-seven match, but then he won the next three, thanks largely to his vexing serve: He usually tosses the ball really high—so high that the air circulation in the arena can dramatically alter its flight—and when he finally hits the ball, he seems to move his head more than his hand.

Jha was sweating so much that after the fourth game, he changed his shirt. Cho won the fifth game, and he and Jha were in an epic battle in the sixth game when the Egypt–Madagascar match finally ended. The dominant chant in the arena became “U-S-A! U-S-A!”

Table tennis games are first to 11, but you have to win by two.

Jha led the sixth game, 10-8. But Cho won the next two points to make it 10-10.

“The pressure, it’s so high for us, because table tennis players … I mean, the Olympic Games, of course, is a marquee event in all sports, but in table tennis, especially, it’s the biggest,” Jha said. “And for me, being from the U.S.A., it’s pretty much the only time the sport is broadcast on television.”

Table tennis became an Olympic sport in 1988. In all that time, the number of American men who won a singles match in the knockout stage was zero.

Now it’s zero plus one.

Jha def. Cho, 8–11, 11–8, 11–2, 11–2, 8–11, 12–10.

“His mental stability is really unbelievable,” national team coach Mark Hazinski said. “I think that’s not something you can learn. You either have it or you don’t. And he definitely has it. A lot of these other guys, maybe their skill level is a little bit better, but that’s just one part of the game. You have to deal with the mental part. And that’s where he really excels.”

Jha looks back on his 17-month exile with at least a bit of appreciation: “My calendar was almost non-stop for the last seven years. So it’s been really challenging in many ways. I kind of took it as, in some ways, a blessing, to be honest: I got time off, a lot more time with family.”

He also used the time to become physically stronger than he was before—and how many athletes can say that after a drug-test suspension? It’s been a long journey. The wonderful news is that it just got a little longer.