It's not a typo: the Liebherr 2020 ITTF European Table Tennis Championships will be held next week in Warsaw, Poland. Like the Olympics, the prestigious continental contest is looking to retroactively restore regularity by preserving the nomenclature of events postponed due to the pandemic. The biennial continental championships were last held in 2018 in Alicante, Spain, where Germany's Timo Boll (pictured, left) and Poland's Li Qian (right) hoisted their respective singles championships. Now, they prepare to defend them beginning Tuesday, June 22, and concluding on Sunday the 27th. Women's, men's and mixed doubles will also be on the menu. Defending women's singles champion Li Qian will have homecourt advantage playing in Poland, which she will need to fend off the hungry field of challengers. Not only will the top-ranked European, Sofia Polcanova of Austria, be on duty, but so too will former champions such as Romania's Elizabeth Samara (2015), Polcanova's compatriot Liu Jia (2005), and Luxembourg’s Ni Xialian (1998 and 2002), who will become the oldest-ever table tennis Olympian this summer at 57. These decorated veterans will not be alone in looking to recapture bygone glories. On the men's side, all but two of the former champions over the last 23 years will be in the mix. This staggering stat is largely brought to you by the evergreens Vladimir Samsonov of Belarus, who won his first of three titles in 1998, and the aforementioned Boll, owner of a record seven continental championships spanning almost two decades. Another oligarch on duty will be Germany's Dimitrij Ovtcharov, a two-time winner who is hot off winning the Russian Premier League Final with his team, Fakel Gazprom Orenburg. Ovtcharov will be keen to join Samsonov on the short list of three-time champions, especially as a much-needed Olympic tune-up. "It is the largest continental tournament and very prestigious," explains Ovtcharov. "Normally, a tournament as important as the European Championship so close to the Olympic Games would be counterproductive. This time I am very happy about it, because we only had the two tournaments in Qatar at international tournaments this year." With Europe's finest players gathered under one roof for a series of zero-sum contests, a Thunderdome-like atmosphere is inevitable next week Warsaw. While the 2020 ITTF European Table Tennis Championships might sound like an anachronistic mistake, rest assured there will be no margin for error.

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