On April 22, Beijing time, WTT issued an announcement officially announcing that the 2024 WTT annual men's and women's finals will be held in Fukuoka, Japan. According to the announcement, this year's WTT Men's Finals will be held from November 20 to 24 at the Kitakyushu City Gymnasium in Japan.
The WTT Annual Finals will have 16 singles and 8 singles and 8 doubles, and the top 16 men's and women's singles players and the top 8 men's and women's doubles pairs in the world will be confirmed as participants and will be compulsori.
In the winter of 2023, Nagoya, Japan once hosted the WTT annual women's finals, and the famous incident of "Zhang Benmei and dominating the electric heater caused Sun Yingsha to freeze and catch a cold" occurred. The 2023 men's finals will be held in Doha in January 2024. Obviously, this attempt to separate the men's and women's annual finals did not achieve the desired effect, and the single-gender finals lacked a lot of complementary colors, were not lively enough, and lost a lot of charm.
This year's regrouping of the men's and women's finals is clearly a lesson learned from several major tournaments in the first four months of 2024. The Singapore Grand Slam, the Incheon Championships and the Macau Singles World Cup have all received great feedback from the market.
2024 is a big year for table tennis, and at present, it seems that from January to November, there will be major table tennis events scheduled every month. ITTF has three top tournaments under the Busan Team World Table Tennis Championships, the Macau Singles World Cup and the Paris Olympic Games, and the WTT series of events has been officially announced so far:
Grand Slam: 3 stops (4 stops all year round)
年度总决赛:2项(全年2项)
Championship: 4 rounds (4 rounds throughout the year)
Star Challenge: 5 stops (6 stops all year round)
Regular Challenge: 9 Races (14 Scheduled Races throughout the year)
There are also more than 20 feeder races, which are not included in the statistics.
With such a large number of competitions and such a tight rhythm, the athletes are more tired than they imagined, but the gains are also proportionally enhanced, especially the market influence, which may climb to an unprecedented height after the cluster bombardment of the competition in 2024.
This year's Fukuoka Annual Finals is an important node in the transition from the Paris Olympic cycle to the Los Angeles Olympic cycle. In the post-Pau era, which players will be the first to set the tide, and which common faces will be seen in the Los Angeles cycle, the Fukuoka finals will be the first bellwether.