Translated material
Elite club
The European Super Cup brought together the best masters of the Old World
The winner of a fundamentally new tournament on the international calendar of small racket masters - the European Super Cup - will be determined tonight at the Kazan Sports Palace. These competitions were organized on the initiative of the leadership of the Russian Table Tennis Federation (president - Minister of Transport of the country Igor Levitin) with the support of the Continental Table Tennis Union (ETTU).The total prize fund of the competition, in which eight of the strongest players from the Old World participate, is $150 thousand. As FNTR General Director Andrey Vyskrebentsev told a Vremya Novostei correspondent, the winner of the tournament will receive a check for $50 thousand, and the finalist will earn $30 thousand. dollars ETTU decided to make the European Super Cup an annual event. Moreover, Russia, as the main ideologist of the creation of this tournament, received the right to be the host of the competition for three seasons, that is, in 2007-2009.
The regulations and principle for selecting participants in the European Super Cup are reminiscent of the final “Masters Cup” in tennis. The winner of the continental top 12, former world number one Belarusian Vladimir Samsonov, European champion 2007 German Timo Boll and six other strongest Europeans according to the International Table Tennis Federation rating entered the fight for the main prize on the Kazan arena. This is the winner of the 2003 World Cup gold medal, Austrian Werner Schlager, naturalized Chinese Chen Weixin, who competes under the flag of Austria, bronze medalist of the Athens Olympics in doubles, Dane Michael Maze, medalist of the 2003 World Championship and the 2005 European Championship, Greek Kalinikos Kreanga, and the first racket of Russia, Alexey Smirnov. . Another of our compatriots, national champion Igor Rubtsov, who arrived in Kazan as an official reserve, eventually replaced Czech Petr Korbel, who was 21st in the world classification, in the tournament bracket, who did not arrive in the capital of Tatarstan for personal reasons.
The tournament participants traveled from Moscow to Kazan on a charter flight organized by the FNTR. All eight players, who knew each other well from numerous competitions, sat in adjacent seats on the plane and warmly communicated with each other for an hour and a half. Dane Michael Maze drew the attention of a Vremya Novostey correspondent to the nuances of spelling his last name: “Often, including in my homeland, they call me Maze, but this is not entirely correct. My father is English, so it's correct to say Maze."
Samsonov, Ball and Schlager arrived in Kazan, as they say, from the ship to the ball. Last week, these three athletes took part in the World Cup in Barcelona, Spain. Schlager lost to the legendary Chinese Wang Liqing in the quarterfinals - 0:4, Ball beat Samsonov - 4:1, but then failed to cope with the representative of the Celestial Empire Wang Hao - 0:4 and in the match for third place also lost everything to him in four games to Wang Liqing. The trophy was played in an important Asian derby. The third number in the world classification, Wang Hao, defeated the 2004 Olympic champion, Korean Ryu Sung Min, 4:0 (14:12, 11:3, 11:8, 11:7).
The Kazan European Super Cup is currently the largest tournament on the continent in terms of total prize fund. It is no secret that for the strongest players of world and continental ping pong, the total income consists not only of fees earned at competitions, but also of substantial advertising contracts. Moreover, the amounts of the latter often exceed the prize money received for specific results at the World and European Championships and commercial competitions. For example, our famous master Andrei Mazunov, who has already completed his career, still receives commissions from the Japanese manufacturer for the sale of a branded racket model named after the Russian.
The Russian journey for the best foreign table tennis masters will not end with participation in the Kazan tournament. From the banks of the Volga they will go to St. Petersburg, where the traditional stage of the Pro Tour series will take place from Thursday to Sunday. Here they will have to not only compete with each other, but also compete with Asians - the trendsetters in the sport, the Chinese and their closest geographical neighbors - the Singaporeans, who also occupy high positions in the world rankings. For St. Petersburg, this tournament will become a dress rehearsal for the 2008 European Championship, the right to host which the northern capital of Russia received last year. Let us remember that last spring Moscow was named the host of the 2010 World Team Championship. So the Kazan tournament opened a series of major international competitions in Russia, which has recently been very active in popularizing table tennis.