Matters of the heart of an unshakable bionic man

He had two cardiac operations before he was 4 and he has Parkinson's disease, but that does not stop Navin Kumar from striving to be a table tennis king.

At 6:30 am one Saturday in March 2016 Larry Hodges arrived at the Maryland Table Tennis Center in Gaithersburg, 80 kilometers from Baltimore, nearly three hours earlier than he usually would. There, in a corner of the club, he set up a pingpong robot, one that shoots balls out from between two spinning disks for as long as required.

For 16 hours, between 7 am and 11 pm, Navin Kumar, who had been training with Hodges for a few years, put the robot to the test. Kumar, who has a congenital heart condition, had been diagnosed with young onset Parkinson's disease three years earlier.