Third FESPIC Table Tennis Championships
Background
While European Table Tennis Championships have a long
history -even before the establishment of the International
Paralympics Committee (IPC) in 1989, the Championships
in the FESPIC region started only when the quota system
was introduced after the Barcelona Paralympics (1992)
as players then had to qualify via high ranking positions
for Paralympic Games and the World Championships. After
FESPIC Table Tennis Championships in Hong Kong (1997)
and Taipei (1999), Osaka, Japan now hosted the third Championships
29 June - 5 July this year.
The Preparations
Being the ITTC Technical Delegate, I went to Osaka for
a venue inspection in April 2000. I found that all venues
were up to the ITTC requirement and moreover, as Osaka
was also the host for the World Championships for able-bodied
this same year, I had full confidence that the 3rd Championships
were to be successful ones.
The Championships
The Championships were held in the beautiful Maishima
Arena, which has a seating capacity of over 7,000. Shuttle
buses with wheelchair facilities were provided to take
people to and from their various accommodations. At no
point was accessibility a problem in Japan.
A total of 107 players from seven member nations/territories
competed in Open, Team and Class events of the Championships.
The Championships are decreasing in the number of participating
member nations, and we thus need to put in more effort
to promote this event. Due to too low a number of players
in some classes, some events had to be combined in order
to have competitions where players could earn ranking
points when winning.
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To meet the ITTC requirement of regional Championships,
seminars for classifiers and umpires were held. And, as
a first in the history of table tennis for the disabled,
a Technical Delegate training and education program was
conducted during the Championships. Another aspect worth
mentioning is that we initiated the category B umpire
system where we qualified a considerable number of non-English
speaking ITTF umpires to officiate in regions of their
language. Previously, ITTC would only qualify ITTF umpires
who could speak English. This was considered unfair to
those who come from non-English speaking nations. So,
this is a great improvement in the development of table
tennis.
Posters and pamphlets were distributed and posted in
public, according to the organizer. It was thus quite
a surprise, that during the five-day competition not many
spectators watched the competitions. The main reason for
this is probably that there were too many major sporting
events hosted in Osaka
in 2001.
Regional Assembly
As decided in the Sydney General Assembly and endorsed
by the IPC, all regional representatives were to be elected,
and elected in regional Championships in 2001. Thus the
FESPIC regional assembly was held 30 June, under ITTC
Chairman,
Mr. Christian Lillieroos. Six nations attended, five of
them
with mandatory voting rights. The new FESPIC representative
Mr. Hong-Jae Lee (Korea) was elected for the term 2001-2005.
I have been FESPIC representative since 1988, and consider
it
to be good that someone takes over the responsibility
of promoting table tennis in the FESPIC region. My best
wishes to him.
Future FESPIC Championships
It is always important that we secure the hosts for the
next Championships and in this respect we have been fortunate
to have Shanghai (China) agree to host the one in 2003,
while Korea and Malaysia have already shown interest to
play host in 2005.
Silas Chiang
Technical Delegate, FESPIC Representative ITTC
(1988-2001)
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