Christian Lillieroos led the sports technical committee of Paralympic Table Tennis over the last 10 years and has recently stood down as chairperson. There is no doubt that, as Silas Chiang said recently: … “For my over 30 years involvement in table tennis, without doubt the past 8 to 10 years have seen the fastest growth of table tennis for disabled …”. We could say that it was perhaps due to technical developments in the game, changes to the rules, or even a larger ball but table tennis as a sport had a very capable leader in Christian. Our sport has been in the Paralympic Games (or their predecessor) since 1976 and the first table tennis committee taking responsibility for all disabilities in the game was formed in 1988. Our previous name of ITTC came into existence in 1980 and within a quarter of a century, we have moved to the extent of recommending to both the IPC Governing Board and ITTF Board, that table tennis be united under one umbrella namely the ITTF.
The past 10 years have been full of activity. We now have a ranking system in place, a working classification system, a handbook with our rules and regulations available and updated regularly, a website full of useful information, a developing competition management system and the list goes on. All of this has been developed by volunteers under the capable leadership of Christian who steered the table tennis ship ably for 10 years (with a short break of a couple of months). Christian undoubtedly knows the detail of table tennis from coaching to the regulations, to being a well-versed TD but he also has an ability to identify people who are the best to do a particular job – Dr Wu is a case in point as he developed the initial ranking system, the website as well as our competition management system – and all these areas were initiated by Christian.
There is much that we have to be thankful for and Christian’s contribution is one of those things. We hope that he will enjoy a break from table tennis and we wish him good luck in his new ventures in China.
Similarly, we take leave of Raúl Calín as Technical Officer. Raúl has been a great asset to us and will remain as such from his relatively new position in the ITTF. He has been a wonderful bridge between IPTTC, IPC and the ITTF and we look forward to working with him and his ITTF colleagues in the near future.
