Table tennis

Gardos and Polcanova reach the European Championship final

Sofia Polcanova and Robert Gardos

(Bild: APA/EVA MANHART)

The mixed duo Robert Gardos and Sofia Polcanova won silver at the European Table Tennis Championships in Linz on Friday. In the first final of these championships, the home team lost 0:3 (-8,-9,-10) to Spain's Alvaro Robles/Maria Xiao. 

This means that the Austrian association (ÖTTV) has now won ten gold medals and one mixed medal in the history of the European Championships. The European Championship gold medal won by Werner Schlager and Hungary's Krisztina Toth in 2003 was the first ever in red-white-red. 

However, Polcanova still has a chance of successfully defending her two titles from Munich 2022 at these championships after her first defeat in her ninth match. She will play in the doubles quarter-finals with Romanian Bernadette Szöcs on Saturday, while the 30-year-old fought her way into the last 16 in the singles. Maciej Kolodziejczyk will also be involved in the doubles quarter-finals on Saturday. For Gardos, on the other hand, the title fights ended with his 14th European Championship medal in total, his fifth in silver. He has also won three gold and six bronze medals so far.

(Bild: APA/EVA MANHART)

In the mixed semifinals, Gardos/Polcanova won 3:2 (8,-10,-12,9,14) against Germany's Patrick Franziska/Annett Kaufmann in a high-class match lasting around an hour after fending off three match points with their own fourth match point. After a 3-1 (8,5,-5,8) win over Turkey's Ece Harac/Ozge Yilmaz on Saturday morning, Polcanova and Szöcs will be up against Xiao and Romania's Adina Diaconu for their next continental podium place.

Polcanova also made her second-round singles match against the 18-year-old Ukrainian Weronika Matjunina a success with 4:0 (5,4,6,9). "I tried to push myself," said the number two seed in the singles, referring to the problem of the high physical and mental strain of the European Championships. "Because if I had stayed calm, I think I would have lost." The second-ranked Polcanova's opponent for advancement to the quarter-finals, also scheduled for Saturday, is Christina Källberg from Sweden.

Daniel Habesohn

(Bild: GEPA)

In the men's doubles round of 16, Gardos and Daniel Habesohn lost 3-0 (-11, -9, -6) to the Germans Dang Qiu/Benedikt Duda. The defeat of the two-time former European champions and five-time European Championship finalists was well deserved after a not so good performance. "I missed a lot of counter topspin balls that I was supposed to make," Habesohn summed up. "In my opinion, we missed too many chances. That's fatal against a pair like that, they're stable." Habesohn and Gardos were eliminated in the singles in the first main round.

Kolodziejczyk, on the other hand, has the chance to make his first European Championship podium in the general class. The 23-year-old European Championship debutant and his Moldovan standard partner Wladimir Ursu defeated the duo Tomislav Pucar/Darko Jorgic (CRO/SLO) 3:2 (10,10,-9,-3,7) in the doubles round of 16. "We knew we could win. We simply harmonize well." The semifinals will be against the Slovenians Peter Hribar/Deni Kozul.