The German table tennis national player Dimitrij Ovtcharov temporarily neglected his sport after the Russian invasion of the Ukraine out of concern for his grandmother.
“In the beginning I didn’t even bother with table tennis, I just thought about how I could bring my grandmother from Kyiv,” said the Olympic bronze medalist in an interview with the “Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung”.
It took a long time before they were able to get the 85-year-old grandmother from her apartment to Germany, he reported in an interview with the “Süddeutsche Zeitung”. “Friends spontaneously took her in the car, she only had her purse and her passport with her,” said Ovtcharov.
Farewell to Orenburg a conscious decision
Only then did he decide, together with his father Michail, a former table tennis player in the Soviet Union, “that it is impossible to continue playing for Orenburg”.
The two-time European champion then announced via Instagram in mid-April that he was leaving top Russian club Fakel Orenburg.
“But I made a conscious decision not to publish the post until a few weeks later, because it was more important to help my grandmother and the people and to clarify a few things for me,” said Ovtcharov.
Ovtcharov joins spectacular project
The Kyiv-born seventh in the world rankings returns to the German Bundesliga as part of a spectacular project.
Together with the Japanese child prodigy Tomokazu Harimoto, the Swedish World Cup runner-up Truls Möregardh and the world ranking sixth Lin Yun-Ju from Taiwan, Ovtcharov will play for the club TTC Neu-Ulm, which was only founded in 2019, in the next Bundesliga and Champions League season to play.