Singles, Men

For the singles qualification, the world ranking list was used with a maximum of two players per nation. Players who did not participate in any of the qualification tournaments were eliminated from the list. The 22 best players qualified for Rio with 40 more places awarded to players from continental qualification tournaments. These included six players each from both Africa and Latin America, 11 each from Asia and Europe, and three each from both North America and Oceania. The remaining eight players received wild card entries, including players from the host nation.

In Rio, the 12 lowest ranked players on the world ranking took part in a preliminary round with six progressing to the first round and they were then joined by the players ranked 33-70 on the word list. In the second round the first round winners met players 17-32 in the world rankings, and It was not until the third round that the world’s 16 best ranked players joined the tournament and further elimination matches took place. These singles formats were the same as in London and possibly Beijing.

All matches were played to the best-of seven, with the first to win four sets taking the match. Dimitrij Ovtcharov of Germany and Bojan Tokič of Slovenia set a world record in their round of 16 match, when the first set went to 64 games, which Bojan Tokič won 33-31. Zhiwen He from Spain was the oldest player at the age of 54 and Kanak Jha of the USA was the youngest at 16. Ma Long easily won his first Olympic singles final against his Chinese team-mate [Zhang Jike] by four sets to one. The clear pre-tournament favourite, he lost only four sets in the entire competition, two in the last-32 and two in the semi-final. Sensationally Vladimir Samsonov from Belarus reached the semi-final after beating Ovtcharov in the quarter-final, but was finally placed an unfortunate fourth.