Before the quirk of fate that directed Darius Knight into the table tennis room of his local youth club, he used to hang out on the streets and stairwells of a syringe-strewn council estate in South London with a gang of 15 boys. It was a way of life that had a cruel and overpowering sense of inevitability about it.

In the past six months, one of his former friends has been stabbed to death, another murdered with a gun and ten more are, in Knight’s words, “living lives on the streets, involved with drugs and crime”.

But Knight, who has just turned 17, has trodden a different path, which has taken him from that bleak estate to a gold medal at the Youth Olympics in Australia in January. In that time he has not only travelled the world high on adrenalin but has learnt about moral choice and responsibility, values that seem to have disappeared from the gangsta-rap culture of Britain’s inner cities. He hopes that his journey might culminate at the top of a podium a few miles from his manor in 2012.

“God knows what would have happened had I not got involved with TT [table tennis],” Knight told me. “By the time I started playing, my dad had already left home. I am not sure where he was, probably in prison. He was involved in drug-dealing and used to beat up my mum. I don’t have anything to do with him any more.

“It would have been easy to get involved in drugs had it not been for sport. My mum did as much as she could for me and my sister but things were tough. I could see how hard it was, so I stopped pestering her for new trainers and stuff like that. One of the best things about the last few years is that, because of my success, I have been able to give money back to my mum — and she knows that it is clean money.”

Knight’s life changed six years ago, when he met Gideon Ashison, a part-time librarian at the time who had a near-fanatical desire to improve the lot of youngsters living on the rough edges of the capital.

“I got involved in table tennis when I wandered into a youth club in Battersea,” Knight said. “Gideon was the coach and, even though I was the worst player in the group, he motivated me to improve. After a while he told a few of us that he wanted to work with us more often because we had the talent to get good. But we didn’t have enough money to hire decent facilities so we had to use the only place that was available.”

That turned out to be a shed in the garden of a friend of Ashison. “Every afternoon I would take the bus to Wandsworth,” Knight, who was 11 at the time, said. “The shed was good because it meant we could play every day for free. There were five or six of us who would meet there and train. We would watch each other and learn from each other’s mistakes. The problem, though, was that, with only one table, you spent most of the time sitting down.”

The gulf between the meagre facilities and the talent of the players was breathtaking. I visited the shed in the spring of 2002, having been harangued for weeks by Ashison. To get an authentic sense of how the youngsters trained, I did not go straight in but peered through the gap in the door. Inside, Knight and another 12-year-old black youngster were hitting a table-tennis ball with the ease, fluency and authority of players twice their age.

Knight’s story of sporting triumph in the teeth of poverty, which appeared on these pages five years ago, not only catapulted him and his teammates into the national spotlight, it has had the effect of transforming other youngsters. Within days of the article appearing in print, donations had started to arrive from readers of The Times, leading to the setting up of TTK Greenhouse, a project that has grown into one of the most crusading sports charities in Britain.

Knight was invited to attend the National Training Centre in Nottingham. “It was a big change because at home I had a lot of stuff to worry about, like whether my mum had enough money or whether my dad would suddenly pitch up,” he said. In Nottingham I could just focus on table tennis and I improved really fast.” Although Knight’s progress was slowed by a cut in funding by Sport England that led to the closure of the National Academy in 2004, he is back on track, travelling the world attending training camps and competitions. When in the UK he trains at the Filton Academy in Bristol, where he lives in a subsidised flat along with a group of other top players. This weekend he will challenge for his first men’s singles title at the National Championships in Sheffield.

But Knight travels back to his family home in London often enough to keep abreast of what is happening and to retain an authentic sense of the desperation and criminality that haunts the crumbling and overcrowded estates of the capital.

“Of the gang of 15 that I used to hang out with, only three of us have done something positive with our lives,” he said. “I was lucky because table tennis offered me a way out. If we could get more sporting opportunities for kids in places like that, it would give others a way out, too.”

Net gains for a boy from Battersea

2000 Darius Knight is introduced to table tennis at a local youth club

2001 Lack of adequate facilities force him to train in a shed in Wandsworth, right. Invited to live at prestigious National Training Centre, Nottingham

2002 First cap for England Youth team at competition in Italy (first time he had been on an aircraft)

2003 Becomes England No 1 on under15 ranking list. Funding shortages lead to closure of National Centre and Knight moves back to council estate in London

2005 Gold medal at European Youth Championships

2006 National Under21 champion at 16

2007 Gold medal at Youth Olympics in Australia. This weekend, Knight mounts challenge for first men’s singles title at National Championships in Sheffield

2012 Ambition — to win gold at London Olympics

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