Fringe sport table tennis: The new Boll is the new Fischer

I have a bit of a tournament lag. The European Championships in Ljubljana, which I attended until the Monday before last, were a failure. Somehow they weren't convincing, not even sporty, at least not completely; There were too many surprises on the one hand and too many disappointments on the other.

The tournament was not only due to the replacement rail service that took me out of the city to Villach - the Ljubljana train station is just as much a construction site as the entire route to the north. At least the bus drove directly and didn't stop at every milk can, as originally feared. In the end I even got back to Vienna on time.

What contributed to the lag - lag as in jet lag, in case you're wondering what exactly that means - was also the seeming irrelevance of the competition. I mean, it was a European Championship! But the city was vibrating because a marathon was taking place on the same weekend - table tennis didn't matter at the latest when local hero Darko Jorgić was eliminated early in the round of 16. There was a bus that drove to the hall, which was of course somewhat out of the way, and that didn't run regularly due to the marathon. Posters around town advertising the event? Niente.

There were no basic supplies around the hall, and the spectators, who weren't really numerous, had to make do with bags of chips. Of course, I was told at home and elsewhere, and not for the first time, table tennis is a fringe sport, and one from the very fringe. Even marathon, phew, is more interesting.

True, but it makes me think. Isn't it the case that this fringe sport is booming, perhaps not at club level (yet) - it's still pretty staid, which was noticeable right down to the German "fans" who actually made their way to Slovenia. But there are pop-up table tennis clubs, not just in Berlin, there are apps and reels, and besides this fashionable stuff, it's still the case that many, many people like to play table tennis, and not just because it's healthy and helps with autism or Parkinson's, for example.

Meanwhile, Annett Kaufmann has of course taken the next step; she became European runner-up in Ljubljana and made it into the “Tagesschau” and other media formats (there was still no Sportschau report). You could say Kaufmann is the new Boll. She is also the new Helene Fischer because she makes no secret of her Russian-German - more precisely: Kazakh-German - background and also fits in well visually, so to speak. She also has the necessary, not false, not excessive, ambition.

By the way, the circus continues, it's almost like football (I also saw empty stands at the European Cup game Monaco against Freiburg, for example): Now the "WTT Champions" are coming to Montpellier, then to Frankfurt, there is also the Bundesliga, and other continental championships took place slightly later than the European Championships. There always has to be something going on, almost regardless of whether anyone is watching.

By the way, ProSieben is currently thinking up the “Celebrity Table Tennis World Cup”. The rule here is that the table tennis bat is the new wok. I'll look at it.