It was one of those moments when you might realize you’re getting old. Sabine Winter from TSV Schwabhausen has already been German table tennis champion in doubles six times. On Sunday, she faced the chance to become the sole record holder in this category with her seventh title, overtaking Nicole Struse. However, their opponents in the Nuremberg final were younger than Winter alone. Even clearly.
Although that is only a bit to blame for the national player, who by the way has also been double European champion twice. After all, at 30, Winter is still in the prime of being an athlete. Only the surprise finalists Koharu Itagaki from TSV Bad Königshofen in Lower Franconia and Josephina Neumann from TV Okarben, who has been playing in the Bundesliga team of the women’s record champion TTC Berlin since this season, both just turned 13 in January. Almost two months after her birth, Sabine Winter had won her first women’s title, back then in Trier, and now she faced these two as the clear favorite alongside Sophia Klee, who is also only 19. And had actually lost the first set, even significantly, 5:11.
It would have been the sensation of the championships in Nuremberg if these two winters of all things had stopped the record attempt. Whereby: Their entry into the final was of course more than just a sensation. After all, the girls, who had just turned teenagers, prevailed in the semifinals against two seasoned first division professionals, Chantal Mantz and Yuan Wan, after all the defending champions. Even on the homepage of the German Table Tennis Association, this hurdle was classified as “insurmountable”. Maybe they just didn’t read it. In any case, Koharu Itagaki and Josephina Neumann won 11:9 in the fifth set, in which they were already 4:9 behind. They would then have simply “played more relaxed,” said Itagaki, who is 20 days younger and, as the daughter of the club coach, a homegrown player from Bad Königshofen.
In the final it was only one set win, despite great support in the sold-out arena. In the second round, Winter and Klee took a 10-0 lead, in the third 7-0, and in the end they clinched the title 5:11, 11:3, 11:6, 11:6 – and thus secured Winter’s sole record, the Incidentally, she set it up with six different partners. “The two little ones did it very well,” Winter said afterwards and added praise to their strong start, which only sounded like a pun to outsiders, but is actually a technical table tennis term: “Having the short-short game She’s definitely better at it than we are.”
Record: Sabine Winter (left) is German table tennis champion in doubles for the seventh time.
(Photo: MaJo/Imago)
In the singles final that took place shortly thereafter, Sabine Winter faced the 16-year-old Annett Kaufmann from SV Böblingen, against whom she had recently lost for the first time in the second half of the Bundesliga season. In the repeat of the semifinals from the previous year, the favorite prevailed 11:6, 11:8, 14:12 and 12:10, defending her title from the previous year and securing the double. Dang Qiu (Düsseldorf) achieved something similar with the men, who, after winning the doubles with Benedikt Duda, also won the singles final against Patrick Franziska in 4:2 sets.
Will Sabine Winter’s record last forever? At least it shouldn’t be easy to surpass him – on the other hand, Koharu Itagaki and Josephina Neumann, for example, still have many years to do so.
