Table tennis players out

Press, 30 September 1988, Page 16

Table tennis players out

PA Seoul The New Zealand table tennis players, Barry Griffiths and Peter Jackson, are out of the Olympic competition. They failed to qualify for second round matches. Playing in section B Griffiths finished seventh out of the eight ’ singles players while Griffiths and Jackson also finished seventh in the doubles. The top two representatives from the B group in singles and doubles go through to the second round competition to contest four Olympic medals. The world’s secondranked player, Jan Ove Waldner, of Sweden and China’s Xu Zengcai proceed to the second round from group B in the table tennis. In the doubles Waldner and his partner, Mikael Appelgren, won the group B competition while Taipei’s Chin Chin Long

and Chin Chin Shui were runners-up. In Griffiths’ seventh singles match the New Zealander was beaten by Taipei’s Chin Chin Long 21- 22-20, 21-16. In their final B round doubles match the New Zealanders were beaten 22- 21-10, by the Englishmen, Desmond Douglas and Andrew Skylet. Griffiths lost five of his matches — to Waldner, Zengcai, Georg Boehm (France), Chin Chin Long, Tonny Meringgi (Indonesia) — and won two over P. Birocheau (France) and Gilani Hosnani (Mauritius). China is favoured to take at least three table tennis golds in the finals. But there could be upsets from the likes of Waldner and Poland’s Andrzej Grubba, who defeated the world champion, Jiang Jialiang, in the World Cup final in China earlier this year.