Huge Swiss delegation at the 1st European Championships

01. Dezember 2015

A total of 27 Swiss (supporters included) found their way to the freshly minted European Championships for teams and singles events in Prague. Links to the results and the official FIR tournament report can be found at the end of the report. Please excuse the author from any omission as matches have been played over two different sports centres, which certainly limited the coverage potential of certain matches. Highlights included, but are not limited to:

-        3rd Men C: Patrick Lorenz

-        3rd U13 Boys: Leonard Ladner

-        3rd U16 Girls: Dara Ladner

-        3rd Team U16: Team Switzerland

(v.l. Yannic Andrey, Tinko Schnegg, Dara Ladner, Leonard Ladner, Patrick Lorenz)

The first two days saw the team competition. Unfortunately, the first snow arrived exactly on Wednesday morning and delayed the flights of some much needed team members. This lead to a few bitter losses as the matches could not be rescheduled because of a very tight time table. After intense negotiation with a FIR delegate, the elite team’s match got postponed for one hour. But even one hour later Nicole Eisler was still missing and the match had to start. Like a miracle, Nicole appeared about 10 seconds before she was due to play. Still a little bit shaken by these events, the team had trouble finding their game against the already favoured Germans and proceeded to lose their match. Remembering their team spirit, they then produced one of the highlights of the tournament in their next match. Christian Schäfer was able to save 8 match points (all of them with serve and volley) in tennis against a tough Dutch opponent and then converted his first match point to a win. The amateur team got hit even worse as they were missing not only one, but three players and had to forfeit their first match. In much better spirits (and better prepared) was the U16 team. Despite losing some nail-biters against the heavily favoured teams from Great Britain and Finland, they fought their way to 3rd place in the tournament. The U21 and O45 teams felt the fierce international competition and had to congratulate their opponents more often than not. 

Only two Swiss players made it into the elite draws. Nicole Eisler did not have one of the easiest draws despite being seeded and had to bow down to her first round opponent, but then proceeded to win the next few rounds to finish in the top ten of the tournament. Benjamin Hampl won his first match, but was then stopped by one of the mighty Danes, who almost exclusively lost only to each other. Top seeded in the B draw, Christian Schäfer lost in the quarterfinals to the eventual winner, Stephan Schmutzer from Austria by only 3 points. In Men C, Switzerland could be seen as the dominating force as 3 players (Patrick Lorenz, Danijel Batinic and Roland Schmid) advanced to the quarterfinals. They even started knocking each other out, with Patrick eventually placing 3rd. The standard in Women B was still a very high level, with only one (Dara Ladner) out of three Swiss Girls (also including Susan Rutschmann and Stephanie Caviezel ex Langenauer) made it past the first round. Men D also saw 3 Swiss participants (Angelo Caviezel, Ricardo Kühne, Leonard Ladner) but unfortunately none of them was able to beat their first round opponent. Leonard got a second chance in the U13 draw and was able to reach 3rd position as a revenge for the Men D and take a bronze medal. Dara could not challenge the dominating English girls in U16 but beat everyone else for 3rd place. In U21, Tinko Schnegg and Michael Strässle had to play each other in the quarterfinals with the better ending for the older Strässle, who ended up with 4th place. Another Swiss player, Yannic Andrey, also made it into the quarterfinals. The author did not hear much about the Seniors categories but participating Markus Furter, JD Andrey, Beat Ladner, Susan Rutschmann will certainly be happy to tell their side of the story. Special thanks goes to Tom Schnegg for doing the video reporting and Graham King who, as part of FIR, made this event possible.

And last but not least, congratulations to Graham King for the 2nd place in the senior's category of the World Tour Race! 

Results Team

Results Singles

Official international tournament report

Gallery

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