The French Emmanuel Lebesson/Jianan Yuan won the mixed competition at the European Table Tennis Championships in Munich.
In the final, the former European individual champion and his Chinese partner Ovidiu Ionescu/Bernadette Szöcs from Romania defeated 3:1 (8:11, 11:6, 11:5, 11:9) and thus succeeded Dang Qiu/Nina Mittelham (Dusseldorf/Willich).
With their success in the first of five table tennis competitions at the European Championships, Lebesson/Yuan ended a short series of successes of the German Table Tennis Association (DTTB) by winning two titles in mixed doubles in a row. Before the gold from Dang/Mittelham in 2021, Ruwen Filus/Han Ying (Fulda/Düsseldorf-Tarnobrzeg) had already stood on the top podium in 2018. As the second DTTB mixed in Munich, Benedikt Duda/Sabine Winter (Bergneustadt/Schwabhausen) were also eliminated in the round of 16.
Bronze went to the Austrians Robert Gardos/Sofia Polcanova and the Slovakian duo Lubomir Pistej/Barbora Balazova. The two pairs had thrown the German combinations out of the tournament in the round of the best 16.
The unfulfilled hopes of the hosts in the Olympic mixed competition make repeating their record result from the previous year seem practically impossible. In Warsaw, the DTTB activists had won four titles and three silver medals, a record in the 64-year history of the European Championship.
The two doubles competitions begin in Munich on Tuesday. In the men’s team, the co-favorite doubles with EM record winner Timo Boll (Düsseldorf) was withdrawn at short notice due to the expected birth of his partner Patrick Franziska’s (Saarbrücken) first child.