Timo Boll

A former world No. 1 and the current top-ranked player from Europe, Boll will make his fourth straight Olympic appearance as he searches for his first individual gold. His lone medal came when he helped Germany take home silver in the team event at the 2008 Beijing Games. Boll reached the round of 16 in the singles event in Sydney in 2000, the quarterfinals in Athens four years later and fell in the round of 16 in Beijing as he was hampered by a knee injury. There is reason to believe the left-hander could medal in London since new ITTF restrictions have limited each country to two players in singles, meaning only two Chinese players will qualify. Boll has been playing well recently, surpassing the Chinese to reach No. 1 from January-March of last year and becoming the lone semifinalist not from China at the 2011 world championships. A winner of five straight European singles titles from 2007-11, Boll has become more popular in the land of his archrivals than in his native Germany, as he has needed soldiers to protect him in China from adoring female fans who voted him the world’s sexiest European in a women’s magazine. Boll, married for the last eight years, created an account on Weibo - China’s ‘Twitter’- that has been flooded with females among his 100,000 followers.