Knock on Wood in Riga

14 Juillet 2017

One of the main export goods from Latvia is wood. Despite only three players from Switzerland showing up, they helped boast those export numbers by bringing home quite a lot of wooden medals and trophies from the latvian IWT tournament.

Nicole Eisler paired up with Kirsten Kaptein from the Netherlands with quite some success. Escaping a loss against Jennifer Schmitz and Zuzana by a narrow margin of two points lead to winning silver in the women elite doubles. Maybe the escape room experience on Thursday evening provided some help there.

Not being fazed by the confusion in the sign up process for the tournament where his original partner pulled out 30 minutes before the entry deadline, Benjamin Hampl and last minute partner Leon Griffiths blazed through the tournament. Despite not winning any set of table tennis, which by the way feels very strange to the author, they were usually already quite comfortably ahead after badminton. In the end none of their opponents could recoup the points necessary leading to the second Swiss IWT doubles title in a row.

In singles Eisler fought valiantly against the triple winner Amke Fischer in the semi finals but in the end had to congratulate the tall German to a well played match. The Sunday morning match, with a little bit less sleep than usual, went her way to secure another podium in her long lasting, very successful career.

Beni not being seeded as world no. 8 pointed to the field of strong players. But being quite lucky Beni did not have to beat a top ten player until the semifinals. After telling everyone who wanted to hear that the world no. 4 Morten Jaksland is bad profile and a better player, he went on playing the match of his life to reach the finals. There his luck run out getting a severe beating in squash from Michi Dickert to finish second place.

Birthday child Graham King for once had no metal, or wood in that case, to bring home. This was not owed to his play but more to the fact that he had to leave early due to some personal matters that needed attending. 

Benjamin Hampl

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