A few days ago, according to the Belarusian news agency, the press office of the country's Olympic Committee said that the captain of the Belarusian national table tennis team Vladimir V. Samsonov has qualified for this year's Tokyo Olympics, meaning the 45-year-old will be competing for the seventh Olympics of his career.
Although Samsonov had not qualified for the Olympic Games through the World Qualifiers and European Qualifiers before, the 45-year-old veteran finished 29th in the Olympic qualification rankings released by the International Table Tennis Federation on June 1, and he was finally shortlisted with a higher ranking.
It is worth mentioning that Samsonov, born in 1976, is the same age as Liu Guoliang, chairman of the Chinese Table Tennis Association. At the age of 7, his father sent him to a table tennis school in Minsk to learn to play. Satsumosonov, who had a talent for table tennis, grew rapidly, and in 1992, at the age of 16, he joined the German First Division table tennis team Sedov, where he soon became the main player. Three years later, Samsonov gradually rose to prominence on the world stage, and at the 1995 World Table Tennis Championships, he and his partner won the men's doubles runner-up and became famous in one battle.
In the table tennis arena from the end of the 20th century to the beginning of the 21st century, Samsonov and Sweden's Waldner, Croatia's Primoratc, three of Europe's top table tennis players, were called the "Three European Tigers" by Chinese fans. Samsonov is nicknamed "Old Sa" by Chinese fans. His gentle and upright gentleman image has also made him supported and respected by the majority of fans. The Belarusian who holds the racket in his right hand is comprehensive in technology, strong in defense, soft and rigid, he is good at causing the opponent's return mistake, and is praised by Chinese fans as the "head of the Taiji Sect", and his height of one meter and nine meters makes his table coverage great, but lacks a certain flexibility.
Samsonov's first appearance at the Olympics dates back to the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, where he reached the men's singles quarterfinals and met China's Wang Tao. At one point, Samsonov led 2-0, but the stadium suddenly lost power twice, forcing the game to be interrupted. After resuming the game, Samsonov's form took a sharp turn for the worse, and then lost three consecutive sets to stop in the quarterfinals. At the 2000 Sydney Olympics, Samsonov reached the quarter-finals again, but lost 2-3 to Waldner, the runner-up. Since then, Samsonov has participated in four consecutive Olympic table tennis competitions, but has failed to win medals. At the 2016 Rio Olympics, he defeated the previous bronze medalist Ocharov in the quarterfinals to reach the final four, but he lost to Zhang Jike and Mizutani Hayabusa in the semi-finals and bronze medal competitions, passing the medals, and the fourth place in the Olympic table tennis men's singles was also Samsonov's best result so far.
The World Cup table tennis tournament is Samsonov's best world competition, in 1999, 2001, 2009, he won the World Cup three times singles title, second only to the national table tennis player Marlene. What is even more admirable is that Samsonov's three summits are the top masters who have won the Chinese team in a row. At the 1999 World Cup, Samsonov defeated Kong Linghui in the group stage, and two years later, he swept Wang Liqin in the men's singles final of the World Cup. In the 2009 World Cup, Samsonov won consecutive victories over Ma Long and Chen Xuan, and once again reached the top at the age of 33, and thus set the oldest record in history to win a singles world championship. Outside the stadium, in September 2020, in the re-election of the European Table Tennis Federation, Samsonov, a legendary belarusian and three-time world champion, was reused and elected vice-president of the UETF.
Today, the national table tennis players of Samsonov's contemporaries, such as Liu Guoliang and Kong Linghui, have retired for many years, but "Lao Sa" still sticks to the court and has become another "evergreen tree" in the table tennis arena after Waldner. The Table Tennis Tournament for the Tokyo Olympics will be held at the Tokyo Metropolitan Gymnasium from July 24 to August 6, and when the 45-year-old Samsonov reappears on the Olympic court, the notorious Belarusian table tennis player will also equal Person, Grand Sever, Primorats and Segu S. Thompson. Toriola jointly holds the record of 7 consecutive Olympic Games.