Damien Éloi

Table tennis career

Since he became a member of the national team in 1990, Eloi is considered one of France's top-level table tennis players in its sporting history. He is a multiple-time French champion in both the singles and doubles tournaments, and has won a total of seven medals (one gold, five silver, and one bronze) in the same discipline at the ITTF World Tour series. Playing with four-time Olympian Jean-Philippe Gatien (1988–2000), Eloi had won two bronze medals in the men's doubles at the 1995 and 1997 World Table Tennis Championships, held in Tianjin, China, and in Manchester, England, respectively. Eloi is previously a member of the table tennis team at the Levallois Sporting Club in Paris, before he moved to Chartres to train for Chartres Table Tennis Sports Association (French: Chartres Association Sportive de Tennis de Table).

Eloi made his official debut at the 1992 Summer Olympics in Barcelona, where he competed only in the men's doubles tournament. Eloi and his partner Jean-Philippe Gatien won the preliminary pool round against Poland, Nigeria, and New Zealand, receiving only three victories and a total score of 143 points. The French pair, however, lost the quarterfinal match to the Chinese duo Lü Lin and Wang Tao, with a set score of 1–3. At the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta, Eloi and Gatien repeated their position in the men's doubles tournament, when the French pair lost for the second time to former West German duo and Olympic silver medalists Jörg Roßkopf and Steffen Fetzner in the quarterfinal match, receiving a unanimous set score of 0–3.

At the 2000 Summer Olympics in Sydney, Eloi teamed up with new partner Christophe Legoût in the men's doubles tournament, where the French pair placed first in the preliminary pool round against Canada's Johnny Huang and Kurt Liu, and Argentina's Liu Song and Pablo Tabachnik, receiving four winning matches and a total score of 96 points. Eloi and Legout defeated Sweden's Jörgen Persson and Jan-Ove Waldner in the first round of the knock-out stage, before losing out their next match to the formidable Chinese duo Wang Liqin and Yan Sen, with a unanimous set score of 0–3. Being chosen as one of the top 16 seeded players, Eloi received a bye in the preliminary pool stage of the men's singles, before beating South Korea's Lee Chul-Seung in his first match. He progressed to the second round, but narrowly lost to China's Liu Guoliang, with a final set score of 2–3.

Eight years after competing in his last Olympics, Eloi qualified for his fourth French team, as a 38-year-old, at the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing, by receiving an allocated spot from the Final World Qualification Tournament in Budapest, Hungary. He defeated Egypt's Ahmed Saleh in the first round of the men's singles tournament, before narrowly losing out his next match to Japan's Jun Mizutani, with a set score of 3–4.