A good eleven months before the summer games in Paris, the German table tennis star Timo Boll has his sights set on his seventh Olympic participation.
The record European champion, who was injured for several months in the spring, announced his international comeback a few days before the start of the Bundesliga season after almost a year’s abstinence for the European Team Championships in Malmö, Sweden (September 10th to 18th).
“Of course, the Olympics are my long-term goal. I feel like I’m still developing, but from January I’ll have to perform and perform in order to be nominated for Paris. The European Championship will do me good because I’ll be able to play a lot of games there in a relatively short time have, and that’s what I need to build up form,” Boll said on Wednesday to “SID” on the sidelines of a media event for his club Borussia Düsseldorf.
Boll had to pull out of the individual World Championships last May because of an injury in his left arm. The 43-year-old returned without a match from the subsequent European games in Kraków. Only then did Boll celebrate his return to the table at the beginning of July when Düsseldorf successfully defended the championship title in the Bundesliga final against 1. FC Saarbrücken. At the international tournament level, Boll last appeared at the WTT Cup in Xianxiang/China at the end of October last year.
If he qualified for Paris, Boll would equal the German record for most Summer Games appearances 24 years after his Olympic debut in Sydney. So far only the Olympic champions Ludger Beerbaum (show jumping) and Ralf Schumann (shooting) have belonged to a German Olympic team seven times in the summer.
For the long final sprint towards Paris, Boll, who starts with his club on Sunday (4:00 p.m./Dyn) in the title defense mission against TTF Ochsenhausen, sees himself increasingly well prepared. Due to the predominantly athletic work since the Bundesliga final, “I can now train harder again and have more confidence in my body again”.