The 55-year-old table tennis player Ni Xialian from Luxembourg defied odds to win bronze in women's table tennis to earn a place at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, when she competed in the European Games in Minsk, Belarus.

Ni lost 4-2 to Portugal's Fu Yu in the semi-finals, but won the third-place competition against Monaco's Yang Xiaoxin by the same score. That earned the Chinese-born player the final ticket to Tokyo, where she will make her fifth appearance on the Olympic stage. Ni shared her excitement with her coach who's also her husband, Tommy Danielsson.

Looking back at her achievements in China, Ni joined Shanghai's team in 1978, and won the women's singles silver in the National Games the next year and then made it onto the national team. As a member of the winning team in the 1983 World Championship, she also took the mixed doubles gold with Guo Yuehua that year and a women's doubles bronze with Cao Yanhua in 1985, before the Shanghai native moved to Germany in 1989 and settled down in Luxembourg two years later.