Quimcy Dsouza one win from India’s first Asian Games teqball medal

Quimcy Dsouza is one win away from securing India’s first-ever Asian Games medal in teqball in Nagoya on Friday, during the sport’s debut at the Games.

Dsouza recovered from an opening-game loss to beat Japan’s Yuina Sakamoto 10-12, 12-11, 13-11 and followed that with a 12-9, 12-7 win over Cambodia’s Koemyean Dy, results that saw the 24-year-old finish top of her group.

India’s other teqball campaign ended in the men’s doubles, where Declan Marshall Gonsalves and Mohamed Anas Imran Beg lost both of their Group B matches, going down 0-2 to Vietnam and 0-2 to South Korea and exiting before the quarter-finals.

Beg, however, remains in the mixed doubles and will continue to compete alongside Dsouza in that event.

Dsouza’s sporting background is unconventional for a teqball contender: the Mumbai-born athlete began in athletics, represented Maharashtra, later played Under-19 football for the state, and only took up teqball in 2022.

She is a seven-time national champion, has been involved with the Teqball Club of Bangalore, and works as a test engineer at Decathlon in Bengaluru; on the international circuit she reached a career-high world ranking of No. 24 and finished ninth at the 2026 World Championships in Romania.

Gonsalves and Beg arrived in Nagoya as World Championship medallists and had won India’s first-ever teqball medal, a bronze in men’s doubles, at the 2024 World Championships in Vietnam.

Dsouza will face Indonesia’s Sumaya in the women’s singles semi-final on Saturday; a win there would guarantee her a place on the podium, while a defeat would still leave her a chance at bronze against the loser of the other semi-final between Myanmar’s Wai Khin Hin and Lebanon’s Kamar Dandal.