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Dang Qiu won European Championship gold as number 13 in the world rankings
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TOBIAS SCHWARZ / AFP
Dang Qiu surprisingly won the Table Tennis Championships in Munich.
In the final, the 25-year-old German won 4-1 in sets (10-12, 14-12, 11-8, 11-9, 11-2) against darko Jorgic (Slovenia), who was five places higher in the world rankings.
Qiu's triumph was the only gold medal in table tennis at the European Championships in Munich.
His mixed partner Nina Mittelham had previously had to give up in the women's singles final due to shoulder problems.
In the history of the German Table Tennis Association (DTTB), Qiu is the fourth individual European champion.
Before the son of the former student world champion Qiu Jianxin and the Chinese ex-national player Chen Hong, the current national coach Jörg Roßkopf (1992), European record champion Timo Boll (eight titles) and Dimitrij Ovtcharov (2013 and 2015) had already won the most important title on the continent .
Qiu, who is also the German singles and doubles champion, immediately extended the successful series of DTTB players in the supreme discipline at his first European Championship start in singles.
At the two previous European Championship tournaments in Alicante in 2018 and in Warsaw in 2021, Boll had won his seventh and eighth individual titles.
In the eight individual European Championships since 2010 in Munich, German players had won gold seven times.
First Boll dethroned, then crowned himself
One day after his quarter-final coup in a club and national team duel with the defending champion and World Cup third Boll and the subsequent victory over former World Cup runner-up Mattias Falck (Sweden), Qiu crowned the tournament with the greatest success of his career.
The 25-year-old had won his first European title in mixed with Mittelham in Warsaw a year ago, before the Nürtingen native also belonged to the German European champion team in Cluj, Romania, last autumn.
Like Boll, former title winner Dimitrij Ovtcharov was eliminated in the quarter-finals.
The former Europe Top 16 winner Patrick Franziska, as the fourth top 15 player from the squad of men's national coach Roßkopf, had to bury his hopes in the round of 16.
Just a medal in the men's singles is the lowest European Championship yield for the DTTB selection in six years.
Most recently, before Munich 2016 in Budapest, only one German was on the podium.
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