Katerina Toliu in the Slovenian Men’s-Women’s Feeder in Otoček, on the other hand five of our young internationals in the Hungarian Youth Contender in Sobateli, felt the great difficulty of World Table Tennis competitions from two different starting points and were eliminated. Toliou was beaten by the in-form Serb Sabina Sourgian in the first round of the singles and completed her presence in the tournament.
All but one of our athletes competed in Hungary on the opening day of the Open. They participated in groups of the Under 17 and Under 13 age categories and experienced elimination.
In Otochek, Toliou was directly on the main board of the singles, while on Tuesday she had the opportunity to compete in the doubles with Malamatenia Papadimitriou (they were eliminated in the qualifiers by a Romanian duo).
The draw in the first round of the WTT Feeder pitted her against the highly regarded left-hander Sabina Sourgian (World No. 127). Our top athlete could not reach high performance standards, while at the same time Serva showed skills against the defense and, thus, came the defeat with 3-0 sets (4-11, 8-11, 3-11).
In Sobateli, the Hungarian Open kicked off on Thursday with two of the five categories for the boys. Along the way, Malamatenia Papadimitriou will also be in town for the Under 19 girls.
All our internationals gave a good effort, some completely inexperienced, others with little experience in the Youth Contender institution, but they were eliminated as third in their groups against a lot of very good athletes from different continents.
It should be noted that Yiannis Koutras and Yiannis Kioseloglou chose to participate in two age categories above their own, although until the end of 2023 the first is included in the boys and the second in the seniors.
Giannis Anastasiadis, Marios Katsaprakakis and Dimitris-Marios Alexandridis also competed on Thursday, while Stathis Manolopoulos starts his Under 19 matches on Friday.
In the category of athletes up to 17 years of age, the participation is so great that 43 qualifying groups were formed. Koutra was in 14th place. In his premiere, he lost 3-1 sets to the Tunisian head Wasim Eshid (6-11, 10-12, 13-11, 4-11) and later to the Italian Nicolas Fama with the same score (8-11, 7- 11, 12-10, 9-11
Kioseloglou participated in the 29th group. In the first match he was beaten by the Pole (number 1 of the group) Marcel Blaszczyk with 3-0 sets (3-11, 4-11, 7-11) and in the second by the Spanish Hugo Urquhart, also with 3-0 sets ( 5-11, 6-11, 7-11).
Anastasiadis was in the 32nd group. Initially, he was defeated by Luxembourg’s Patrick Vanz (head) with 3-0 sets (7-11, 9-11. 7-11) and in the decisive second match he was “bent” in five sets and overtime by Austrian Jen Skerbing (8 -11, 11-7, 7-11, 12-10, 10-12).
Katsaprakakis was drawn in the 39th group. The head Swede Noah Dahlström obliged him in the first match in a 3-1 set loss (6-11, 7-11, 11-8, 8-11) and then Slovakian Pavol Kokavec with a 3-0 set (5-11, 4-11, 5-11).
In the category of athletes up to 13 years old, 11 groups were created and Alexandridis achieved the only victory for the Greek team. In the end, he took fourth place in the first group, but it was important that he measured his strength through several games.
At the beginning, in fact, he had a special experience because he faced the first favorite, the very strong Chen Kai Cheng from Chinese Taipei. He lost 3-0 sets (1-11, 2-11, 2-11) and then fought back with the same score against Romanian Raul Creucou (4-11, 7-11, 5-11) and Kazakh Andrei Motchalkin (15-17, 9-11, 0-11).
In the fifth game, he prevailed with a reversal from 0-2 of the Turkish Akis Kariev (8-11, 5-11, 11-6, 11-6, 11-7).
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