Timo Boll actually wanted to stop at the mid -30s. A decade later he is still on the table tennis table – but for the last time on Sunday. The conclusion of a world career.
It is the end of an extraordinary career: Timo Boll will be on the record for the last time as a table tennis professional this Sunday-not in a friendly game, but in a final for the German championship.
The 44-year-old meets the TTF Ochsenhausen with Borussia Düsseldorf in the Bundesliga playoff final. The opponent is not an easier: players like Hugo Calderano, the World Cup finalist from Brazil, the Japanese double world champion Shunsuke Togami and the Frenchman Simon Gauzy is strongly staffed. Nevertheless, Boll is looking forward to the challenge – precisely because his last game is so relevant.
“To have this goal of being able to win another title: I am grateful for that. That it will not be irrelevant on the home stretch,” said Boll, about whom the former world champion Steffen Fetzner said in an interview with the newspaper “Die Welt” last year: “Timo is a player of the century, a century talent.”
The final begins on Sunday at 1 p.m. in the Süwag Energie Arena in Frankfurt and will be broadcast live at the streaming broadcaster Dyn. In the hall itself, Boll should be made the farewell as beautiful as possible. Instead of 3,000, 4,000 spectators are approved this time. Among them will also be basketball idol Dirk Nowitzki. The 46-year-old is a close friend of Boll.
It was “quite nice” to go into a final as an outsider, said Boll. In his long career, in which he started seven times at the Olympic Games alone, this did not happen often. In fact, it would be his 15th German championship title with Borussia Düsseldorf-another milestone for the record European champion.
So Boll does not say goodbye in the shade, but on the big stage. A suitable conclusion for an almost 30-year career in which the Odenwald won four Olympic, ten World Cup and 28 EM medals.
Before this ends, the German table tennis scene bows in front of the former number one in the world. Shooting star Anett Kaufmann, who dreams of a similarly successful career at the age of 18, said, for example, to “Olympics.com”: “Timo was just a huge legend. Whether in table tennis or for people. Then everyone said ‘yes’.