Suzhou, May 2, 2015: China’s XU Xin and ZHANG Jike are the new Men’s Doubles World Champions, after being victorious at the Qoros 2015 World Table Tennis Championships in Suzhou, China.
XU added the gold to his Mixed Doubles title last night with his Korean partner YANG Haeun to become the first international mixed doubles champions since 1954.
XU and ZHANG overcame teammates FAN Zhendong and ZHOU Yu 4-2 (12-14, 11-7, 11-9, 9-11, 11-7, 11-9) in an eagerly anticipated final match at the Suzhou International Expo Centre.
On their route to gold, the dynamic duo took down highly profiled international pairing of Timo BOLL (GER) and MA Long (CHN), and Japan’s Masataka MORIZONO and Yuya OSHIMA among other strong contenders for the crown.
After the thrilling final match, ZHANG stated “I am very happy to win my first ever doubles title at the World Championships. The support from the media and cheers from the fans in the venue definitely was a huge motivation behind the win.”
XU added “Very honored to be able to win both doubles medals, but honestly it feels a little incomplete for me having knocked out early in the Men’s Singles event.”
In the Men’s Singles semifinals, 18 year old FAN Zhendong (CHN) pulled off an amazing match against former World number Timo BOLL (GER) on their first face-off on the international table tennis arena. The 2014 Youth Olympic Games champion beat the 34 year old German 4-2 (12-10, 11-9, 8-11, 11-7, 13-15, 11-7).
Meanwhile, FAN’s teammate FANG Bo knocked out Germany’s Patrick FRANZISKA 4-1 to set up another all-Chinese semifinals in Suzhou. FAN will play against world number one MA Long, while FANG will face grand slam champion and two time world champion ZHANG Jike tomorrow in the semifinal stage of the Men’s Singles event.
Read all about DING Ning’s (CHN) famous victory in the women’s singles final earlier in the day:http://bit.ly/1KCV228.
The Qoros 2015 World Championships is well on track to be the most followed table tennis event of all time.
Over the first five days of competition that started on 26 April, not only was the sessions well attended by spectators flooding into Suzhou from all around the globe, total unique viewership in China alone achieved a record 185,727,000 audiences as reported by CCTV. The historic mixed doubles match won by Chinese/Korean pair XU Xin and YANG Haeun, recorded the maximum unique viewership of 81,770,000 in the host country.
With unprecedented level of efforts on the social media promotion, the 2015 World Championships have also achieved Facebook impressions of 7,730,000, and resulted in over 823,302,000 hits on ITTF.com over the six days of event. —- ITTF
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