Translated material
Healthy Appetite
At the World Championships, Russia will compete for the result and the 2010 World Cup
The World Championship started in the Croatian capital with qualifying matches. During the week, the small racket masters will compete for five sets of awards - in men's and women's singles and doubles, as well as in mixed doubles. Moreover, unlike the recent continental championship, where our Svetlana Ganina in tandem with the representative of Belarus Victoria Pavlovich won gold, the creation of international tandems is not allowed at the world forum.The unprecedented success of the Russian national team at Euro 2007 in Serbia, where the girls won silver in the team tournament, and in addition to Ganina, Irina Kotikhina, Oksana Fadeeva, Fedor Kuzmin, Alexey Smirnov and Dmitry Mazunov also won medals of various merits in individual disciplines, allows we hope for progress in Zagreb too. True, at the World Championships the competition is much higher, since the superiority of the trendsetters in this sport, the Chinese (and Asians in general), over players from other countries is enormous, if not colossal.
The individual championship of the planet is held in odd years, the team championship in even years. In the 2005 season in Shanghai, out of 20 medals (matches for third place are not held, and “bronze” is awarded to both losers of the semi-finals), only two went to Europeans: “silver” was won by the German pair Timo Boll - Christian Chasse, “bronze” was won by the Dane Mikael Maze. The Korean O Sang Yun, who took third place, also intervened in the Chinese dispute over awards; all the other 17 (!) prize places went to athletes from the Middle Kingdom. So the competition in Zagreb has an additional intrigue: will the “rest of the world” be able to somehow break the hegemony of the leaders of the Chinese team.
For Russian athletes, it is fundamentally important to maintain the forward movement in results that has been clearly observed over the past year, with the arrival of Igor Levitin, the country’s Minister of Transport, to the post of President of the Russian Table Tennis Federation (FNTR). By the way, after the European Championship, the FNTR Board of Trustees was created, which included representatives of business and government agencies interested in the development of this sport.
Almost certainly the results of the Croatian tournament will be more joyful for us than the results of the Russians in Shanghai 2005. Then eight out of ten singles participants were unable to overcome the barrier of the first round (1/64 finals); only Ganina and Smirnov reached the third round. The latter, together with Kuzmin, were among the 16 strongest pairs - this is our nominally best result in the Middle Kingdom. In Russian history, the highest success at the World Championships is considered to be women's tandems reaching the quarterfinals (Elena Timina and Irina Palina, 1995; Ganina and Palina, 2003).
Ten athletes will compete for the Russian national team in Zagreb. For Smirnov, who occupies the highest 18th place in the world ranking for our compatriots, this will be the tenth anniversary world championship. Alexei's Belgian club Charleroi recently won the European Champions League trophy. Let us recall that Smirnov is the only representative of our country who managed to win the prestigious continental tournament “Top-12” in 2005. The winner of the Pro Tour series stage (Slovenia 2005) Kuzmin (Fakel Gazprom, Orenburg), his teammate Kirill Skachkov, as well as Igor Rubtsov (French Montpellier) and Grigory also have experience in participating in world championships for adults and youth. Vlasov (Italian Torino) will make their debut at competitions of this level. The men's team is led by head coach Igor Podnosov.
The first number of the women's team (mentor - Vladimir Endolov) went to Croatia Svetlana Ganina, who recently, after reaching the semi-finals of the Brazilian stage of the Pro Tour, rose to the best place in her career in the world classification - 36th. The champion of the Old World spent the past season in the Dalenergosetproekt team (Vladivostok), which was among the four strongest participants in the European Table Tennis Union Cup (ETTU). This is Ganina’s eighth world championship. She is accompanied by Irina Kotikhina, Yulia Prokhorova, Anna Tikhomirova (all Lokomotiv-GZD, Nizhny Novgorod) and Anastasia Voronova (Dalenegrosetproekt).
Noteworthy are the changes made in the lineups compared to the European Championship. The course taken by the leadership of the FNTR and the coaching staff towards the rejuvenation of the national team is clearly visible. For men, the place of veteran Dmitry Mazunov was taken by the talented Vlasov; for women, the most experienced winner of the 1994 World Cup team, Irina Palina, and participant of two Olympics, Fadeeva, were replaced by Voronova and Tikhomirova. Yes, indeed, now is the time to look forward, although, perhaps, to achieve immediate results, one could once again turn to the services of experienced craftsmen. But the Russian team has a more global task ahead, because the Olympics are ahead, the 2008 European Championships on the banks of the Neva and, hopefully, the 2010 World Championships in Moscow. It is in Zagreb that the congress of the International Table Tennis Federation (ITTF) must decide on the venue for the world championship, choosing between the Russian capital and the Austrian Linz.