Tenis de Mesa

Table tennis originated over 100 years ago in Great Britain. The first World Championship was held in 1926 in London, and the first European Championship dates from 1958 in Hungary. Initially the competitions were held in the individual-team format, but since 2003the World Championships in team and individual play began to be held separately. The last individual and team European Championships were held in Ekaterinburg, Russia in 2015.

Table tennis made its Olympic debut at the 1988 Seoul Games. Since then, the vast majority of Olympic gold medals have been won by China’s tennis players, who have dominated the world for years. The main achievements of Russian tennis players on the world stage were the victories of Zoya Rudnova and Svetlana Grinberg at the World Championships 1969 in Munich (Germany), where they won gold in the team tournament and in the women’s doubles competition, as well as the success of the mixed pair Stanislav Gomozkov and Tatiana Ferdman at the World Championships 1975 in Calcutta (India), where they were stronger in the final than another Soviet pair - Sarkis Sarkhoyan and Elmiri Antonyan. In 1994, the Russian women’s team won the team World Cup. At the European Championships, Soviet and Russian tennis players many times took firstplace. The last time success went to the male duo of Lev Katzman and Maxim Grebnev, who became the best duo in Europe in 2021.