Living the Good Life: Table Tennis Training in Sweden

By Whitney Ping, USA Nationals Under 22 and Under 18 Girls’ Champion

Whitney Ping

Any avid fan of our sport immediately associates Sweden with table tennis because of its reputation as a world powerhouse, producing the likes of Jan-Ove Waldner, Jörgen Persson, Peter Karlsson, Mikael Appelgren, Stellan Bengtsson, Jens Lundqvist; the list goes on and on.…

So when the opportunity to train in Sweden at their newly opened National Table Tennis Training Center was presented to me, I jumped at the chance. Doru Gheorghe, the National Women’s and Junior Team Coach, had a good friend visiting him named Benone (Ben) Grigore. Ben is the head coach for international players and he and Doru were able to arrange for me to practice there for one month in preparation for the U.S. National Team Trials. Of course it is always more fun to go with friends, so I talked with my buddy Misha Kazantsev who said he was interested in coming also. And just like that, we were off to Sweden.

Misha Kazantsev

The training center is in Koping, about an hour-and-a-half driving distance from the Stockholm airport. A very nice man named Mikael, who is also a player’s father, picked up Misha and me. When we arrived in Koping, Mikael took us to meet Ben who was running a training session. My first impression of the Center: Well, you can tell that I am a table tennis player when I describe the playing venue as a "thing of beauty." It is a sight to see – a table tennis coach’s and player’s dream; equipped with brand new top-of-the-line tables, perfect lighting, plenty of room, locker and weight rooms, and incredible flooring. The floor is similar to the Taraflex flooring that we see at the U.S. Nationals but I think it is better because it is harder (meaning one can bounce a ball on it and it would bounce back) and a bit less grippy. Kjell-Åke Waldner, Jan-Ove’s brother and the Swedish Table Tennis Association’s High Performance Director, said they chose this floor because it is easier on the knees for training. They designed this center with the athlete in mind, and in my eyes, as well as in Misha’s, it is as close to perfection as you can get.

Ben took us to the Hotel Scheele where we would be staying for the next month, and showed us around Koping. It is a very small but beautiful and humble town, packed with more snow than people (population: 2500). He then showed us around the high school, which is located only a few steps away from the training hall. Nearly all of the players, both Swedish and international, do not live in Koping, so they stay in apartments and are given bikes to get around town. It is apparent that the Swedish Table Tennis Association has everything covered, as the high school is ideal for all the players because it allows them to continue their schooling while still getting in high-quality and quantity practice time.

For the next month, Misha and I practiced about five to six hours a day, with Sundays off to rest. The level of the players that trained in Koping ranged from 2150 to 2700, with ages ranging from 14-20. Johan Axelqvist, Sweden’s top male junior, was the best player there along with a 20-year-old Chinese player who came to play for Club Koping in the Swedish leagues and to train with Johan. Besides the Swedish players (most of whom were girls – many of the Swedish Junior Girls’ Team members train at the Center), there were also quite a few international players (mostly boys) from Belarus, including Dmitry Davidovich, the cadet boy’s European doubles champion and member of the Belarussian National Team, and also players from Latvia, Estonia, Wales, and Poland. A few days before we got there, the number one ranked Australian junior girl, Claire Cambell-Innes, who is my age (16), also arrived and was staying for the same length. Claire became good friends with Misha and me, and we often walked to practice and ate meals together, exchanging American and Aussie slang.

For the most part, the Swedish players practiced amongst themselves, as did the international players, but they combined for a few sessions per week. Misha and I were fortunate to be able to split our time between both; about a week after we arrived the international players went on a trip to Denmark, so we trained with the Swedes under Coach Soren Ahlen. Soren is a great person and also a great coach who used to coach the Swedish, Japanese, and English National Teams. He was tough on physical training and we had some really demanding workouts after practice. The Training Center also had a sports psychologist come to talk with us in both group sessions and one-on-one. He told me to keep a simple training log, scoring myself after every day on areas like: Technique, Mental Attitude, Physical Fitness, Match Play, and Effort. The log was to show evidence of hard training in order to build confidence and also monitor your performance. I noticed that after a hard physical training workout, my self-scores in my training log went down for one or two days after but after the soreness was gone, they started to go higher and higher; until of course we had another grueling workout.

We began every practice with a light physical warm-up that lasted 10 to 15 minutes, with music in the background kicking it off and pepping things up. There was a joke between the players about how the Swedes take a longer time to jog and stretch, so we always knew that if it was a Swedish player, it was going to be a long one! Practice was generally a serious time where we all focused on our table tennis games; but during breaks and after practice we were able to talk, relax, and have a good time. The coaches ran most of the drills but every session we got to choose what we wanted to work on, and on Tuesday afternoons the coaches left it to the players to run practice. Soren said they did this so we can learn how to train hard even without a coach. One of my favorite drills that I learned was to loop one forehand from the middle of the table into the blocker’s backhand, and then the blocker blocks that either to the forehand or backhand side; after the person doing the drill returns that shot, the blocker then blocks back to the middle, and the drill continues. Both Misha and I could tell that our level of play was steadily improving each week, because we were becoming more consistent in the drills. I did well in match practice, playing even with the top Swedish girls.

Misha and I ate at the school cafeteria for breakfast and lunch during the weekdays and were given a frozen dinner pack for dinner. We had a tomato and cucumber sandwich every morning. And we basically had potatoes for lunch and dinner on Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays; and pizza on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. Perhaps it is a slight exaggeration but it seemed as if potatoes are the staple food of Sweden, much like rice is in Asia; at the cafeteria, there were three types of potatoes – mashed, boiled, and slice – every day. But douse it with some gravy and it wasn’t bad at all. The pizza on the weekends came from a nice pizzeria called Stellat that Misha and I looked forward to going to on Fridays. They gave us great big personal pizzas; Misha’s toppings most often consisted of shrimp and clam (!), and I liked just ham on mine; but we both really liked the ox once we tried it. And even though Stellat was good, by Sunday night we were ready to go back to potatoes and meatballs until the next Friday. Ben also bought snacks to keep us going through the day like bread and sandwich meat, yogurt, frozen meals, and fruit; and Misha and I discovered how good the salami in Sweden is. We were treated very well by everyone while we there, especially by Ben, and we both really appreciated it. Looking back, it is a blessing that we were able to meet such great people.

Another positive aspect of Sweden is the TV channels. At the Hotel Scheele where we got separate but adjacent hotel rooms, our thing to do was to call each other and say, "Hey! The Simpsons is on channel five. Oh wait, ER is on channel 7!" Unlike many other European countries, Sweden does not dub over the English with their language; instead they put in Swedish subtitles. Maybe that is one of the reasons why the Swedes speak such good English, and by the end of the month, I was able to pick up a few basic Swedish terms. However, there was a grave downside to the continuous showings of Jay Leno, CSI, and the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air: it distracted us from our homework! But no worries, we are finally caught up...now.

Another cool thing that we got a chance to see while in Sweden were some European Team League Matches. We watched the Men’s Team (Fredrik Hakannson, Jens Lundqvist, and Magnus Molin) play against Belarus (Vladimir Samsonov, Evgueni Chtchetinine, and Dmitry Chumakov). The rankings went accordingly with Samsonov beating Molin, Hakansson defeating Chumakov, and Lundqvist downing Chtchetinine. With Sweden up 2-1, Jens was set to play Samsonov. I had my video camera with me and was trying to get some footage, but every couple of points I was forced to put it down so I could cheer for Jens, the Swedish compatriot and underdog. Samsonov is so consistent and likes to go back from the table and counterloop, which is to his advantage because of his long reach; Jens has one of the most powerful forehands in the world and in the past six months has really jumped up to a higher level. I’ve seen some really good live matches between pros, but this match went down in the record books with Lundqvist winning at 9 in the fifth.

In the middle of our third week in Sweden, junior players from all over the world came to the Training Center for the ITTF World Junior Elite Camp that was held prior to the World Junior Circuit event. The World Junior Circuit (WJC) is similar to the ITTF Pro Tour but for junior players only. The six-day camp was a blast. The first day and half of the next, everyone (boys and girls) trained at the same time. The caliber of the players was extremely high; some of the very best were there, as well as our friend Pierre-Luc Hinse from Canada. There was also a very large group of Japanese university players who were the Camp’s special guests. On the second day, we split into groups. The girls’ group was led by Thomas von Scheele, who is the 1991 Men’s Doubles World Champion (with Peter Karlsson) before he hurt his back. He is now the Swedish Women’s National Team Coach. It was a great experience to play against all sorts of different styles and players from different nations. There was one Japanese shakehand player who had inverted on one side and long pips on the other with some of the most incredible serves I’ve ever seen. At the end of our training session one day, all of us crowded around a corner table for quite a while, standing in awe (and perhaps a bit of envy) of her serves.

We took our meals at the hotel where all the players were now staying, and we had an equally good time at night because many of us often got together to eat lunch and dinner. One night we had Misha, Claire, Kyle Davis (Australia), Kate Steward (England), Zeina and Zeid Shaban (Jordan), and myself, all eating and playing the card game, Uno, for hours until it was time to rest up for another fun, but demanding day.

On Tuesday, all the players took a bus to Orebro, a city an hour away from Koping, where the WJC was to be held right before another tournament, the "Safir Internationella." The initial round robins began Wednesday morning. The top seed on the girls’ side was Georgina Pota from Hungary, who is the current European Girls’ Champion; for the boys’ it was Germany’s next star and also top European junior player, Christian Suss. I was seeded second in the fifth group. Number one in my group was a left-handed player named Marina Marizova from Estonia whose Under 18 world ranking was #36. I squeaked out a nine in the fifth win, through some great counterlooping points, and eventually finished first in my group. Because of this, I was given a bye in the round of 32. In the 8ths I played Renata Krazcyk from Poland who was second seed in the tournament. I played too passively and she was able to get the first attack in most of the time with her forehand, which was very strong and spinny. She also rarely pushed long so I had a hard time initiating my backhand attack like I normally like to do. I lost 4-1; and she went on to win the next two rounds but lost in the semifinals to Georgina Pota, who proved her dominance on the junior scene by winning the event without dropping a single game! Misha faired not as well in his group, failing to advance out of his round robin; but of course he was not expected to come out because of the strong field of players. Minoru Muramori won the boy’s event, defeating his fellow Japanese compatriot, Yoichi Tokiyoshi, in the final. Johan Axelqvist went down in the semis, as did Brazil’s lefty-penholder Cazuo Matsumoto (who had upset Suss, 9 in the seventh).

The next day the Safir tournament began. Safir is one of Europe’s biggest, if not the biggest, junior tournament of the year. There were over 600 participants representing 33 countries (mostly juniors), and I think it’s safe to say that every single player was a respectable, well-trained player. In the Women’s Elite event; I was seeded third in my group and played the first seed, Magda Cichoka from Poland, who is currently ranked #29 in the world in Under 18, and got a really terrific win, 3-1. Just the day before I was telling Claire that I thought she was one of the strongest players in the WJC, so this victory was definitely a surprise to me, but it also made me realize that I can hang with some of these players. However, I lost to the second seed, which forced a three-way tie, and Cichoka advanced.

What is amazing about this tournament is the number of female players. I was playing in the 20 & Under Women’s, and in just this event alone there were 109 competitors; in the U.S. we would be lucky to have 15 entries in our Women’s Singles at our National Championships! Another clearly noticeable aspect was the organization of the tournament. Every match (yes, all 2550 of them) was umpired by one of Safir’s 200 volunteers. They also had a 98-page tournament program that had the draws and times of every event and the draws were up on the Internet weeks in advance.

In the round of 16 of the 20 and Under Women’s, I beat Fu Lei, a Chinese pips-out penholder who was seeded in the top ten in the Women’s Elite event, 3-2. In the 8ths, I lost to a Japanese chopper, 3-1, who really outplayed me with her consistency and her deceptive ability to change up the spin.

What was supposed to be my best event, the Junior Girls 17 & Under, began on Sunday with 91 players. I had a bye in the first round and if I won my next two matches, I was set up to meet Renata Krawczyk again, the player I had lost to in the WJC. However, she went down in the second round and I was putting in some good wins, which took me to the quarterfinals. In the quarters I played Maria Viktorchyk from Belarus. We both fought hard but in the end, she claimed the win, 9 in the fifth. I was disappointed but overall very happy with my performance in the tournament. For reaching the quarters in that event, I won a lava lamp.

Overall, Misha did well and maintained a good fighting spirit. He started off slow in the beginning but as the tournament went on he got stronger and stronger, playing a close match against 13-year-old Jun Mizutani from Japan. Mikael Andersson, the ITTF Junior Coordinator, put it very well in the tournament booklet when he stated this in his letter, "Jun Mizutani, Japan... No more or no less. Just make note of time and table. It is well worth it!" At first I did not understand what he meant by this – until I saw this kid play. He is a lefty with incredible touch, a killer backhand jab/block, and the ability to counterloop almost anything with his forehand. If you remember this name now, I think that there is a good possibility that you will be hearing it again in more prestigious events within the next five or six years.

The Men’s Singles had nearly all of the very best players from the Swedish leagues entered as well as some foreigners; most notably: Jörgen Persson, Werner Schlager, Jens Lundqvist, Martin Monrad, Mikael Appelgren (who is still amazing to watch even though he is not the player he once was), and Kim Song Hui. Lundqvist won the event, defeating Persson in the semi’s (-9, -10, 7, 9, 9), and Chen Jian in the final, 4-2. The Women’s Singles field was quite a bit weaker, but Georgina Pota came out towering above her competitors.

After the Safir tournament, Misha, his father and I returned to Koping to pack up for our trip home. Before I left I put in two more practice sessions with the Luxembourg team that was training at the Center in preparation for their National Championships. Then we said our goodbyes, took some last-minute pictures, walked around town, and ate at Stellat for "old times sake." We both had identical opinions of our stay in Sweden – it was the best overseas trip we had ever taken. I would like to thank Doru Gheorghe and Benone Grigore for making the trip possible; and our new international and Swedish friends for making it memorable.