It has been an up-and-down week for Eugene Wang. The 34-year-old Canadian Olympian has endured agonizing losses on foreign soil and thrilling victories at home. Last Sunday at the 2019 Joola North American Team Championships in Washington, D.C., Wang led his Digital Multitools Inc. team to the finals. There, they faced the Joola Grunwettersbach team. Wang's first match of the finals saw him take a 2-0 lead over Lubomir Pistej, who then stormed back to win the next three games and the match. The teams went back and forth until it was tied two-all in a race to three. The championship would come down to Eugene Wang against defender Wang Xi. Again, Eugene Wang built a 2-0 lead, only to see his opponent come back and tie it up. In the deciding fifth game of the fifth match, Eugene Wang held three match points at 10-7. Wang Xi then engineered a comeback for the ages, mixing long-pips backhand chops with sudden forehand loop kills to steal the match and the championship with five straight points. After such a bitter disappointment, Eugene Wang got right back on the horse and went back to work. His next mission was to represent his country at the 2019 ITTF Challenge Plus, Benemax-Virgo North American Open. Held at the Markham Pan Am Center in Ontario, the tournament saw the world #319 Wang first matched up in the round of 64 with the comparably ranked Daniele Pinto, 20, the world #314 from Italy. In a seesaw battle, the players went back and forth in the the first five games. Fortunately for Wang, he won the first game, so by game five he was up 3-2. Rather than continue with the trend and see if it held in game seven, Wang broke the pattern and closed it out in six games. With the support of the home crowd, Wang marched confidently into the round of 32. There, he met 26-year-old Yang Sanghyun from South Korea. Yang, currently unranked, was playing with house money after beating Belgium's Thibaut Darcis (world #444) and Brazil's Eric Jouti, a major coup at world #84. Wang, however, was in no mood to become Yang's next scalp. Instead, he calmly won the match 4-1. This set up a sweet sixteen showdown between Wang and China's 20-year-old Cao Wei, whose world #805 ranking belies his previous ranking of #354 as recently as May of this year. Against the young attacker, Wang again showed a penchant for seesaw matches. He also again proved that this strategy works best when you win the first game. Instead of slamming the door shut early as he did with Pinto, Wang went the distance with Cao, bringing his rowdy Canadian home crowd to their feet as he closed out game 7 by the minimal margin, 11-9. After a week on the road that could have shaken anyone's nerve, Eugene Wang showed that there is no better remedy for the soul than a little home cooking.

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