Recently, the 32-year-old German table tennis world champion Ochalov posted on the Internet, saying such a sentence: "One of the greatest athletes, retired." And here he is not referring to anyone else, but to Vladimir Samsonov, the 45-year-old Belarusian world champion who recently announced that he had given up participating in the Tokyo Olympics and withdrawn from international competitions.
As the standard-bearer of The European table tennis in recent years, Ocharov has maintained a very good friendship with his almost uncle Lao Sa, and the two have even been compatriots in the same country for a while. Now that Samsonov's legend is over, when will the end of his career with veteran Ochalov arrive?
Samsonov was born in Belarus in 1976 and Ochalov was born in Ukraine in 1988, and friends familiar with history will surely find that they were both citizens of the former Soviet Union for a short time, but it did not take long for the two countries to completely separate.
When Ochalov was 4 years old, his parents moved to Germany because they were worried about the impact of the Chernobyl incident - because the old Ocha was also a table tennis player, so the little Ocha also embarked on this path, and did not expect to become the world champion (Dad's results were mediocre), which is indeed unexpected.
When Ochalov first appeared in the world table tennis world, Samsonov was already a multiple world champion and European champion, and could be called the opponent's idol. According to Liu Guoliang's brother Liu Guodong, Samsonov was once invited to naturalize in Germany, but he chose to refuse, so he did not become a compatriot with Ochalov again.
However, even if Ochalov went to Germany, he was still very lucky to be a teammate in the club with Samsonov for more than ten years, which also deepened the relationship between the two.
For the retirement of Lao Sa, the media of various countries have competed to report, Belarus, Germany, China, Japan are no exception, the World Table Tennis Federation also issued an article saying that this is "the end of an era" . What makes European fans even more sad is that after Samsonov, the top masters of European table tennis are dying of old age: Pol is 40 years old, Ochalov is 32 years old, if they retire again, can they succeed someone?
Samsonov's time was over, and the likes of Waldenell before him were no exception. How long will the era of Bohr and Ochalov last? Let time give us the answer!