Friday July 30th 2021
He wins the last thriller
A mental monster named Ovtcharov
By Michael Wilkening, Tokyo
Again such an epic duel – but this time Dimitrij Ovtcharov has the upper hand. After the bitterest defeat of his career, the table tennis professional showed remarkable perseverance and took bronze. How does he do it? Because he’s a mental monster.
At some point, maybe in a few days, Dimitrij Ovtcharov will get very tired. When the Olympic table tennis tournament is over, he will feel the exhaustion that he is now outsmarting with mental strength. When his physical and mental strength run out, the positive memories will help him. In addition to the certainty of having maneuvered yourself beyond the limits of what appears to be possible.
“If I had lost today, I would not have known how to sleep or eat,” said the 32-year-old, giving an insight into his state of mind. With a remarkable performance, not even 24 hours after the bitterest defeat of his career, he had found the energy to assert himself again against all odds. Ovtcharov won in the “Metropolitan Gymnasium”, the table tennis hall in Tokyo, after another table tennis thriller with a 4: 3 (13:11, 9:11, 6:11, 11: 4, 4:11, 15:13, 11 : 7) the bronze medal against the Taipei Chinese Lin Yun Ju.
Lin is just 19 years old and is trusted to break the dominance of the Chinese. “He’s getting better every month,” said national coach Jörg Roßkopf about Lin and attested him the “best second leg topspin in the world”. Ovtcharov’s opponent has innumerable weapons in his game and because he is developing so rapidly, he is harder to analyze than the world’s leading Chinese. The task was incredibly difficult and seemed almost impossible to solve because Ovtcharov had lost dramatically in the semifinals to Ma Long, the world’s best player in recent years, the day before.
“Epic” duel against Ma Long
Roßkopf used a ruse to set up his protégé before the bronze match. “His daughter wants him to bring something, and preferably a medal. I told him that on the bus yesterday,” said the coach, who also won a bronze medal in individual at the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta. More than many others, Roßkopf was able to empathize with Ovtcharov’s frame of mind and evidently chose the right words to enable his protégé to perform another great mental act.
Not even 24 hours before the show of strength against the upcoming star of the table tennis scene, the “best game of my life” (Ovtcharov) was not enough for the final. In an 86-minute match, which experts described as “epic” immediately after the last rally, he lost to the Chinese top star Ma Long. For seven sets, Ovtcharov fought a high-class fight with the Olympic champion of 2016 and 2021, who yesterday won the final against compatriot Fan Zhendong with 4-2 sets. The favorite had wobbled several times in the semifinals. The German and the Chinese pushed each other on to an achievement that was previously hardly imaginable. Both actors invested all physical and mental energy in the match – but only Ma Long left the record with positive emotions.
“I hardly slept, scraps of play kept coming before my eyes. I was so exhausted this morning and didn’t know how to get up,” said Ovtcharov of the hours before the bronze match. There was no conviction of being able to get up again. Somehow she returned in the hours before the match.
In the quarterfinals Ovtcharov had to do extraordinary things psychologically. Against the Brazilian Hugo Calderano he was 0-2 sets behind, in the third round the South American also led before the German found a way out of the impasse in his head. “It didn’t work at all for two and a half sentences, but then I found myself in the game and suddenly turned it around”, Ovtcharov looked back. Table tennis is a physically, but above all a mentally stressful game. Against this background, the German has achieved almost inhuman things in the past few days.
Against Lin in the game for third place, he had to assert himself again against considerable resistance. In the first set Ovtcharov fended off a set ball, in the sixth set even four match points. “He had a good chance at a match point and for a split second I thought that was it for me. When he hit the ball, I said to myself: This is help from the very top. I had to accept that”, Ovtcharov reported on conversations of the extra-natural kind. Afterwards he could not be stopped. The final round was a clear thing, Ovtcharov had won the nerve game.
There were phases in the first few sentences in which the German seemed physically and mentally tired. With remarkable perseverance, Ovtcharov managed to pull himself out of the small lows again and again. “What a rollercoaster these days,” said the German. The roller coaster ride was rewarded with a medal. “That’s crazy,” said Ovtcharov, shaking his head in disbelief.
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