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Olympia review
China's back-breaking dominance
Fans, active players and officials expected a festival from the Olympic Games and they received it: perfect conditions, amazing atmosphere, spectacular matches and unexpected media attention provided a very positive result for the olympic table tennis games. Nearly 400 spots were filled with reporters and photographers when the final rounds in the team tournament were carried out at the Beijing University. Tickets for spectators were sold out months ago: table tennis was the first sport to be sold out!
Adham Sharara, president of the ITTF, called "the number of tv-viewers in China a sensation for our sport". The Canadian reported that in the first week table tennis was no.1 in the viewing rate concerning four of seven days. "That's great for our sport and a big chance for the future." Nevertheless he was not happy with everything that happened in Beijing. "As the president it hurts to look at the results" Sharara confessed. "It was clear that the team events would be dominated by the Chinese, but China winning all the single medals is not good for our sport."
The dominance could not have been more back-breaking. Beside the win of both team competitions, China also won all gold medals as well in the men's as in the women's singles. China's athletes did not even loose one match on the way to their total triumph. All the games in the team competition ended up 3:0.
The medal table puts emphasis on the dominance of Asian athletes. Eleven of twelve medals were taken by Asian associations: The teams from South Korea that won the bronze medal in the male and female team competition and Singapore's women team illustrated their membership to the world class. Moreover China won eight of the twelve medals.
Germany's male team created an European gleam of hope. andro-star Christian Süß, Dimitrij Ovtcharov and Timo Boll achieved the biggest success since the last twelve years by winning the silver medal. In Atlanta 1996 Jörg Roßkopf won an Olympic medal for the DTTB: bronze in the male singles.
The team tournament that was carried out for the first time at the Olympic Games turned out as a big success. Sharara called this event the "emotional climax" of the Olympic table tennis tournament and stood up for maintaining this competition. "An essential plus factor of this competition is that it guarantees matches between different nations while the single matches were isolated by Chinese players and did not evoke such emotional attendance." The president starts thinking about changes in order to increase tension for the next games.
"Very soon I am going to discuss some changes with the ITTF and the IOC", Sharara mentioned.
What is his consideration?
"A single tournament with maximum two players of every nation. This would avoid one country winning all the medals like it was shown in China. I want to keep up the team competition because it is the emotional climax. Furthermore I want back a double competition with 16 pairs restricted by one double per nation."
Time will show if Sharara's wishes will be fulfilled while many competitors of different nations want a maximum representation of their discipline. The Canadian is optmistic: "We will discuss that and then we will see. Basically table tennis has big chances for the future. We have to make use of it!"
