Cláudio Kano

Cláudio Mitsuhiro Kano (18 December 1965 – 1 July 1996) was a Japanese Brazilian table tennis player who helped popularize the sport in Brazil and "spearheaded Brazilian table tennis in the 1990s".

Career
Aged 17, he shared two gold medal, in men's doubles and men's team, at the 1983 Pan American Games. He went on to win five more golds, three silvers, and two bronze at later Pan American Games.

At the 1987 World Table Tennis Championships held in New Delhi, Kano reached the round of 16, one of the best results in Brazil's history in the tournament, equaling Ubiraci Rodrigues da Costa, known as Biriba, who fell in the round of 16 in 1961, a result only surpassed by Hugo Calderano later, in 2021.

Kano also achieved two impressive results at the Table Tennis World Cup: he placed sixth in the ITTF World Cup, in Macau, in 1987, and in Nairobi, Kenya, in 1989.

He had participated in the Summer Olympic Games of 1988 and 1992, but lost in the first stages of both.

There were only 18 days left before the opening of the Atlanta Olympic Games (1996), in which Kano was to participate, when Kano was the victim of a traffic accident in São Paulo. Kano was driving a motorbike when he was closed in by a car. He hit the guardrail and died at the age of 30. Kano won six South American titles in his life and was, until then, the biggest medalist in the history of Brazil at the Pan American Games, with 12 medals, a mark that was surpassed by Hugo Hoyama, at the Pan American Games in Rio, in 2007.

Kano became one of the top 40 in the world rankings.