From 13 'til 17 November, the German Open (a world tournament for points for the world ranking) was played in Berlin. Zhang Jike originally was the player with the most chance of winning the tournament, together with Timo Boll.
But despite the fact that everyone thought these 2 would play each other for winnings, the number 5 seed came in and won the German Open.
Fan Zhendong, a Chinese player of only 16 years of age (!), beat Dimitrij Ovtcharov in the final match with four to one.
In his victory, he beat the players who are on place 4, 5 and 9, while he is currently ranked on place 11 on the world ranking. Of course it's pretty clear to everybody that his ranking will go up immensely, when the ranking will be renewed in December.
In comparison, the previous player who achieved something that impressive was Ma Long, and he is currently ranked N°1 on the ITTF World Ranking. Jean-Michel Saive (our national pride) became the best Belgian player for the first time at the age of 16 (1985), which is also very impressive.
So in my opinion, Fan Zhendong will be great a player who will achieve a lot in his future, so we have to watch out for him in the next tournaments.
For the first time ever, we had an international tournament voor players with a disability in Belgium. So I guess we can say the pressure was pretty high. However, everything went very smooth, thanks to a lot of volunteers. So all by all, the tournament was a great succes.
There are 10 types of 'disabillities', which indicates the level of your abilities. The types from 1 - 5 are people in a wheelchair, and types 6 - 10 are the people who are still capable of walking. The lower the number for each group, the worse the disability is.
Three of the eightteen Belgian players managed to reach the final in their respective categories: gold en silver for Mathie Loick and Marc Ledoux in categorie 8, and Ben Despineux, who received the silver medal in categorie 7.
Unfortunately, next year there won't be a Belgian Open. The reason for this is that the organisation wanted to wait, and see how the first edition went. If everything went smooth (wich we now know, it did), they would try it again in 2015, because if you want to organise an international tournament, it has to be registered more than a year before date.
Xu Xin, currently number 2 on the world ranking, defeated Vladimir Samsonov in the final match with 4-1. Earlier, he had already defeated players like Dimitrij Ovtcharov and Patrick Baum. One of the best European players, Timo Boll, was defeated in the semi-finals by Samsonov. In the small final match (the match for 3rd & 4th place), Ovtcharov defeated Boll in 4 short sets.
The only Belgian player in the tournament, Jean-Michel Saive, didn't make it further than the group phase, in wich he lost from Marcos Freitas and Yang Zi. Jean-Mi is without a doubt the best Belgian player (despite his age of 43 years old!), but the competition in the rest of the world, and China in specific) is way too high.
Next month the world ranking will be updated, so I think these results will surely have an influence on that ranking.
From 13 'til 17 November, the German Open (a world tournament for points for the world ranking) was played in Berlin. Zhang Jike originally was the player with the most chance of winning the tournament, together with Timo Boll.
For the first time ever, we had an international tournament voor players with a disability in Belgium. So I guess we can say the pressure was pretty high. However, everything went very smooth, thanks to a lot of volunteers. So all by all, the tournament was a great succes.
