TonTennis player Thomas Schmidberg won the German team’s first gold medal. Paralympic Games Just missed it in Tokyo. The 29-year-old has been paraplegic since he was 5 years old, sitting in a wheelchair, and lost to China’s Pan Fengfeng 2:3 in the final thriller on Saturday. Although Schmidberg won the silver medal, just like the 2016 Rio Olympics, his last opponent won the Paralympic gold medal for the fourth consecutive time.
After two sets, the Chinese team clearly won the final victory. Feng is very good, and Schmiberger reacted. At 9:11 and 4:11, the German who played for Düsseldorf quickly fell behind 0:2. Then there is the game of catching up. He equalized the score with 11:8 and 11:4, and Feng had more courage in the high-level game in the deciding set.
Stephanie Grebe (Berlin) had a similar experience. Rio’s second player lost 0:3 in the semifinals to European champion Maljak Aliyeva from the Russian Paralympic Committee, but has already won the bronze medal by entering the semifinals.
The third place will not be eliminated in Japan, and the two semi-final losers will each win bronze medals. Valentin Baus still has a chance to do better than his teammates.
On Sunday (3 AM CEST), he will reach the final after defeating Englishman Jack Hunter Spivey 3-0 in the semifinals. The 25-year-old also met his final conqueror from Rio in Cao Ningning, China.
