Valentina Popova (table tennis)
Soviet-Slovak table tennis player
Valentina Ivanovna Popova (Russian: Валентина Ивановна Попова) (born 21 November 1960 in Sumgait) is a former Soviet, and then Slovak, international table tennis player.
Table tennis career
From 1976 to 1994, she won 18 medals at the Table Tennis European Championships. At the European Championships in 1984, she won all four possible gold medals (singles, team (USSR), doubles (with Narine Antonyan), and mixed doubles (with Jacques Secretin), becoming the second ever absolute European women table tennis champion (Zoja Rudnova was the first one to do that in 1970).
She is a multiple USSR National champion - six times in singles, five times in doubles, and three times in mixed doubles.
“Valentina Popova (table tennis)” enters the record as soviet-Slovak table tennis player. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Valentina, Popova and table can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“Valentina Popova (table tennis)” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Valentina, Popova and table provides the most credible route into that argument.
Chronology provides the most reliable spine for this subject; interpretation should follow only after identities and dates are secure. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 26, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q449032. The first chronological checks are 1960, 1976, 1994 and 1984.
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This entry incorporates text from “Valentina Popova (table tennis)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.