On May 2, Beijing time, the 2024 WTT Saudi Arabia Grand Slam continued to compete for the second round of qualifying. Previously, on May Day, 42 players (21 men and 21 women) had been eliminated from the competition, and the qualifying round needed to play three rounds to produce 8 places to advance to the main competition, which can be said to be quite cruel.
The national table tennis delegation arrived in Jeddah on the afternoon of May 1, almost the last team to arrive at the venue. In this competition, the 12 main forces of the national table tennis men and women all directly enter the main competition, and there is no task of qualifying for the competition, therefore, before the start of the main competition on May 4, the main forces of national table tennis mainly focus on two things.
First, the draw ceremony will be held at 22:00 tonight.
At present, the lottery representatives have been determined, and the national table tennis male and female world No. 1 Wang Chuqin, Sun Yingsha and African No. 1 brother Omar Assar and Brazilian sister Takahashi Bruna will be used as lottery representatives to create the Saudi Arabian Grand Slam form of the draw.
The importance of the signings is self-evident, and the singles signings are particularly eye-catching. According to the seeding of this tournament, it can be predicted that the men's singles Wang Chuqin and Fan Zhendong will be in the upper and lower halves, and the women's singles Sun Yingsha and Wang Manyu will sit in the first and last two 1/8 zones.
There is no suspense of internal competition in men's singles, so no matter what lottery is drawn, what the six main forces of national table tennis have to do is to try their best to move forward without too much pressure on the basis of ensuring that they do not lose foreign wars.
The final battle between women's singles Wang Manyu and Chen Meng still has the possibility of a plot reversal, so there is still a big difference in which half of the region Chen Meng is signed in. But in the final analysis, Da Meng will either meet Sun Yingsha in the semifinals or Wang Manyu in the semifinals, and no matter who she meets, she must win to be able to achieve a reversal. But lately she's been losing all against the seafood sisters, so it's really difficult.
Second, the national table tennis needs to quickly adapt to the hardware of the Saudi Grand Slam.
The most important piece of information that came out on the first match day was that the competition venue in King Abdullah Sports City was not the internationally accepted "hard foundation + floor glue" model, but "a layer of floor glue glued to the floor". The earthquake was felt very strongly, and the players stomped on the serve and stepped on when they moved a lot, causing a very significant "tremor".
Players who participated in the first round of the qualifying round revealed that the tremor could be felt in the audience. In fact, the live broadcast footage is often shocked to the point that the picture shakes, and even ghosting.
The floor shook strongly, and the broadcast footage was often shaken out of the ghosting brushing effect
Therefore, the national table tennis players need to quickly adapt to this special competition venue, and its fine control of the competition will definitely have an inevitable impact.
In addition, in the first round of qualifying, there was also a new record with a bit of peculiarity: Greece's Gionis defeated Chinese Taipei's Liao Zhenting to advance to the second round, which was the 300th victory of Gionis's career on the international stage, and he was the 25th of only 24 active players in the world to have achieved 300 wins before.
What's more worth mentioning is that Gionis is 44 years old, the oldest men's singles player at the Saudi Grand Slam, and he studied dentistry during college, and he has been busy running his own dental clinic for the past two years, and basically does not go out to play international competitions. It was just before the Olympics that he came out to brush up his points and participated in the European Olympic Qualifiers at the end of May.
Finally, I hope that Wang Chuqin and Sun Yingsha can draw an ideal good sign for everyone in national table tennis. It is hoped that Takahashi Bruna, who will replace Diaz in the draw, can continue to carry forward the tradition of American Teguro and create more "groups of death" to make the game more tense and exciting.