Jan Ove Waldner – The God of Table tennis
A veritable myth. A living legend of the sport. Nicknamed “the Mozart of table tennis,” Jan-Ove Waldner won it all. Winner of the World Championships in 1989 and 1997, the World Cup in 1990 and the Olympic Games in 1992, he became the first player in history to achieve the Grand Slam by winning all three major table tennis competitions. To this day, he remains the only non-Chinese player to have achieved this feat. He also won 4 World Team Championships with the Swedish team (in 1989, 1991, 1993 and 2000), and was of course world #1 for many months. These performances allowed him to be elected to the Table Tennis Hall of Fame in 2003 (with his Swedish national team mates, Jörgen Persson and Peter Karlsson).
A European runner-up from the age of 17 in the early 1980s, the Waldner empire stretched over almost 25 years and ended in a semi-final at the 2004 Athens Olympics at the age of 38. His record is so impressive that it would almost make his silver medals at the 2000 Olympics and the 1983 and 1999 world championships anecdotal.
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Beyond his brilliant performances, Waldner revolutionized the game, disgusting all his opponents with his quality of variation and his innate ball touch. In fact, after his 1992 Olympic final, which he lost 3-0 to the Swede, Gatien said of him: “I can’t remember a guy with so much spin and so much variation in placement and camouflage. Horrible! ». That definitely says something. For the younger ones, we leave you with a compilation of his best moves.
