When the spectators were enthusiastic about the table tennis player Benedikt Duda, they shouted “Dudadudaduda” from the stands. In the Linz Arena at the weekend you could have had the feeling that an emergency vehicle was approaching every time – only there were no blue lights to be seen.
Despite his 30 years, Duda from Gummersbach from the Oberberg Bundesliga club Schwalbe Bergneustadt had not yet been on everyone’s lips in the big, wide world of table tennis, but at the European Championships in Austria he played like a young god and made it sensationally into the final.
There, on Sunday evening against the 21-year-old Alexis Lebrun, a blue light would have been necessary. Tatütataa! Duda was picked apart by the phenomenal Frenchman. He lost 0:4 and only scored 21 points. Blackout in the most important moment of your career – table tennis can be as cruel as that.
After he achieved a 4:3 sensation in the quarterfinals against the younger Lebrun brother, the up-and-coming and top seed Felix Lebrun, 18, and he also defeated his favorite teammate Dimitrij Ovtcharov 4:2 in the semifinals, Duda reached the final towards the older brother. Alexis Lebrun played like an AI-controlled wind-up man in Linz. He just hit everything at an unbelievable speed. He hardly made any mistakes. He defeated the German defending champion Dang Qiu 4-1 in the quarter-finals and the Swedish high-flyer Truls Möregardh 4-0 in the semi-finals.
Duda’s silver was an enormous success – no one had a chance against the Frenchman Alexis Lebrun
“That went quickly,” said Duda after the almost half-hour finale. There wasn’t much more to say. He never made it to the final – and then it was all over again. However, even reaching the final was a huge triumph. The silver medal will shine brighter and brighter over the next few weeks. Back in the summer, a cartilage injury in his knee forced Duda to take a two-month break from competition.
The same passage from Anton Bruckner’s Fifth Symphony was heard again and again in the Linz Arena during the European Championships. This was because Austria is commemorating the composer’s 200th birthday this year, and Bruckner’s Fifth also contains a sequence of notes that has become famous in arenas around the world – as a guitar riff by the band White Stripes. ‘Seven Nation Army’ is the name of the hit that every sports fan can sing along to. In Austria the old Bruckner version was preferred.
Old and young in the changing rhythm of the generations – this was the motto of the European Championships for the Germans too. Timo Boll, 43, recently ended his international career, as did the 2021 European champion, Petrissa Solja, 30. And also the two Chinese natives Ying Han, 41, (due to injury) and Xiaona Shan, 41 (not nominated), were not there in Linz.
In 2021 in Warsaw, Germany (with Boll, Solja and Shan) won a total of four titles and seven medals, which was the best German result ever at an individual European Championship (with singles, doubles and mixed). In 2022 in Munich, the DTTB won one title and four medals. If the 2024 European Championships meant a generational change, then the question was: How many titles and medals are appropriate in times of change? The answer was: no title, but four medals. Bronze for the mixed Annett Kaufmann/Patrick Franziska, silver for Benedikt Duda and bronze for Dimitrij Ovtcharov in the men’s singles and bronze in the women’s singles for Nina Mittelham.
In the end, Kaufmann seemed a little disappointed, but her future remains promising
Annett Kaufmann, 18, the new female fixture of German table tennis, is known to prefer listening to Taylor Swift to Bruckner, and she plays with such vigor. In Linz she came third alongside Franziska. In the semifinals, the two missed three match points against the Austrians Sofia Polcanova and Robert Gardos. In the women’s doubles, Kaufmann and Nina Mittelham were eliminated in the round of 16 and in the singles it was over for her in the second round when she met the top seeded Romanian and finalist Bernadette Szoczs. In the end, Kaufmann seemed a little disappointed, but her future is bright.
With Nina Mittelham, Sabine Winter and Yuan Wan, three German players reached the quarter-finals. Among the men there were even four: Ovtcharov, Franziska, Qiu and Duda. “It was an all-round successful event,” said men’s national coach Jörg Roßkopf and predicted close duels with the other four quarter-finalists at the next European Championships: the French Felix and Alexis Lebrun and the Swedes Truls Möregardh and Anton Källberg. “It will continue like this for the next few years,” says Roßkopf. For Benedikt Duda this could mean that he might get another chance.
