Shin Yu-bin and Ryu Han-na win bronze at World Table Tennis Championships in Qatar

Shin Yu-bin and Ryu Han-na clinched a bronze medal in the women’s doubles event at the 2025 World Table Tennis Championships in Doha, Qatar on Saturday, showcasing the recently reunited duo's talent.Shin and Ryu fell short of reaching the final after losing the semifinal 3-2 to Sofia Polcanova of Austria and Bernadette Szocs of Romania, but still secured an automatic bronze as the tournament does not have a third-place match.The Korean duo's bronze demonstrates that the country has a reliable powerhouse in the women's doubles, where Shin and now-retired Jeon Jee-hee had excelled.This year's world championships are not the first time Shin and Ryu have played alongside each other, as the duo won the Asian Junior Championships together in 2018 and finished runners-up in that tournament the following year.While Shin went on to win a silver at the World Championships in 2023 and gold at the Hangzhou Asian Games that year alongside Jeon, Ryu established herself as a dominant doubles specialist in the Korean league with her Posco International teammates.The reunion of Shin and Ryu came after Jeon’s retirement and signals their potential for further improvements ahead of the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics.Shin ends this year's world championships with two bronze medals after claiming her first in the mixed doubles event with Lim Jong-hoon and becoming the first Korean female player to earn multiple medals in a single world championships in 32 years in the process.The last to do so was Hyun Jung-hwa, who won gold in singles and silver in mixed doubles at the 1993 Gothenburg championshipsShin has won medals from every major competition at 20, with three world championships, four Asian Games and two Olympic medals in her medal-rich cabinet.She not only won Korea's first gold medal in 21 years at the Asian Games in 2023 by topping the podium with Jeon in Hangzhou, China, but also ended a 12-year medal drought in the sport in the Olympics with a bronze in the mixed doubles events at the Paris Games last year alongside Lim.She went on to capture one more bronze in the team event in Paris.BY KO BONG-JUN, PAIK JI-HWAN [ [email protected]

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