The German men’s table tennis national team will compete at the European Team Championships in Sweden without their national coach Jörg Roßkopf.
To better prepare for the 2024 Olympic Games in Paris, the double world champion from 1989 will hold a training phase lasting several weeks with the top players Dang Qiu, Dimitrij Ovtcharov and Patrick Franziska parallel to the European Championships. The German EM team around record European champion Timo Boll will be looked after in Malmö by Roßkopf’s close confidante Lars Hielscher, who is the head trainer of the German Table Tennis Center in Düsseldorf. The first opponent at the European Championship is Finland on Sunday (7:00 p.m.).
Roßkopf: “Too many games”
“It’s important for me to have the big goal of the Olympics in mind,” said Roßkopf. And for top players like Olympic bronze medalist Ovtcharov or individual European champion Dang Qiu, given the many international competitions in the new World Table Tennis (WTT) tournament series, the following applies: “The players have trained far too little and played far too many games.”
The consequence is: “That’s why I’m not satisfied with the form of the players and that’s why I unfortunately have to subordinate a European championship to that,” Roßkopf continued: “Actually, it’s crazy: The European Championship is a big tournament, there will be an Olympic place played – and the German team plays there without the current numbers one, two and three.”
The 54-year-old speaks of a “crazy situation that has currently arisen in table tennis. I just have to have the foresight and say: That’s important to us, and that’s important for German table tennis. And there it’s exactly like in important in recent years that we win medals like at the Olympic Games,” said Roßkopf. The 42-year-old Boll is also only taking part in the European Team Championships because he urgently needs competition practice after an injury break of several months.