European Olympic Singles Qualification | 12 Aug 2014

Wutaishan Gymnasium awaits young TT stars

There are four days remain before the start of the Youth Olympic Games. The 2nd Summer Youth Olympic Games will be held in Nanjing, China. Day after the opening ceremony, the table tennis events for Nanjing 2014 will take place at Wutaishan Gymnasium (bet

The Youth Olympic Games aim to bring together talented young athletes aged from 15 to 18 from around the world (205 National Olympic Committees participated in Singapore 2010).The Summer Youth Olympic Games feature over 3,500 athletes. The sports programme is based on that of the Olympic Games, with 28 sports featured on the summer programme and seven on the winter programme. In addition, the programme also includes exciting new disciplines and formats, such as 3-on-3 basketball, ice hockey skills challenge and mixed gender and mixed National Olympic Committee (NOC) events.

In table tennis there are three events in total, including men’s singles, women’s singles and mixed team. For medals will play 64 athletes in total, including 32 male and 32 female. The maximum number of athletes per NOC is one man and one woman.

The difference between the ITTF Junior World Championships and the Youth Olympic Games is in the fact that there is no Mixed International Teams events in the ITTF Junior World Championships. In addition, the changes has been made since the Singapore 2010 Youth Olympic Games. The names of the competition phases have changed. “First Stage”, “Consolation Draw” and “Main Draw” are the names used for Nanjing for both the singles and the team event instead of the terms “First Stage”, “Second Stage”, “Second Stage B” and “Third Stage” used in Singapore.

The singles event consists of three phases of which only the first is a round robin group format instead of four stages of which the first three were round robin group formats in Singapore.

Milica NIKOLIC, EWT, Milica NIKOLIC, EWT