Vietnam’s number one table tennis player brushed aside Australia’s number two player in the qualifier and France’s number two athlete in the first round to be among the best 32 table tennis players at the 2008 Olympic Games.
Few Vietnamese fans expected Quoc to get past the qualifier let alone the first round.
At the 2004 Olympic in Athens, Quoc won only one set and bowed out in the qualifying round.
In the leadup to this year’s Olympics, Quoc didn’t do much training, concentrating instead on recovering from a shoulder injury.
Despite the setbacks, the athlete from south-central Vietnam gave fans surprise after surprise with his excellent performance and his best form ever.
In the qualifying match in the morning, Quoc, ranked 223rd in the world, took an easy 4-0 win over Australia’s second best player David Zalcberg in just 27 minutes.
He had a little difficulty in the third set as the score see-sawed. Yet when the score was locked at 10-10, Quoc made two crosses to defeat the Australian player.
More than two hours later, Quoc took a 4-2 win over France’s second best player Christophe Legout, who outranks Quoc by 171 places in the world ranking table.
Legout, who used to be 17th in the world and fourth in Europe, made a lot of errors and lost the game.
“I had decided to be relaxed and try my best whoever the opponent was,” Quoc said after his upset victory. “Perhaps that was why I could perform well. The French athlete was very good and more experienced than me but he might have been surprised to see how hard I tried and he lost concentration in decisive moments.
“At times, I was in trouble, especially when the opponent was taking the lead but I concentrated and tried to seize one point after another and I did it.”
At 10 a.m. (local time) today, Quoc will face Russia’s top player Alexei Smirnov, ranked 29th in the world. Smirnov placed fourth in the table tennis men’s doubles at the 2004 Athens Olympics and was ranked fifth in Europe in 2005.
Vietnamese fans are expecting Quoc to create another upset in today’s match.
Reported by Nhut Quang-Dang Khoa |
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