MALAYSIANSKINI | It was 10pm local time when Elaine Lim finished her match inside Tokyo Metropolitan Gymnasium.

Throughout the game, Malaysians were glued to their television watching her every move.

It was the gold medal match between China and Japan in the women’s team table tennis event at the recent Tokyo Olympics and a Malaysian was in the thick of things.

Dr Elaine Lim, a dentist, was the umpire for the match. Her appearance received widespread attention from Malaysians alike.

After all, finding a Malaysian in a final match at the Olympics is not an easy sight.

“I think most people will be very curious or feel strange why a normal person would just enrol into umpiring,” she told Malaysiakini during a virtual interview recently.

“When most people talk about sports, they’ll talk about athletes and coaches, rarely would they think about umpiring.

“But my uncle was a badminton umpire, so I was exposed very early on in my life to the profession,” she said.

Lim was 15 years old when a teacher nominated her to sit for the umpire exam in her home state of Kedah.

By then, she had been playing table tennis for eight years and participated in various competitions as a school athlete.

“I started playing table tennis when I was seven,” Lim recalled.

Initially starting as just fun and games with her father and sister, Lim quickly grew fond of the sport.

She would train two to three hours a day, and her mother would bring her to the local table tennis club where she played with people much senior to her.

“I thought It was really fun because I was really young and I could play with people who were older,” she added.

There, she gained invaluable experience and a deep understanding of the game as a player.

At age 15, she figured accepting the nomination to the umpire exam would be a...