Tomokazu Harimoto Signs Up For The $1.5 Million T2 Asia Pacific League!

NEWS: TOMOKAZU HARIMOTO SIGNS UP FOR T2 ASIA-PACIFIC TABLE TENNIS LEAGUE!

On the 26th April 2017 T2 Apac announced the confirmation that Japanese wonderkid Tomokazu Harimoto will participate at this summers $1.5 million table tennis league in Hong Kong!


This is one of the most anticipated table tennis events of all time and will be a spectacular show for fans across the globe! The impressive league has a prestigious $1.5 million prize fund!

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Tomokazu Harimoto Confirms Participation!

Tomokazu Harimoto has caused uproar in the table tennis world and dominated media headlines for insane performances over the last 2 years! When the youngster now 13 came onto the scene at age 11 he defeated top 100 world senior players! Since then, Harimoto has shot up the rankings and now currently sits at 61 on the Men's ITTF World Ranking list!

The Japanese child prodigy is the latest confirmed player for the T2 Asia Pacific League alongside Romania's Bernadette Szocs. Harimoto's best tournament victory came this year in February reaching the final of the Indian Open World Tour losing to World No.5 Dimitrij Ovtcharov who will also be competing at the T2APAC league.

Harimoto is the youngest ever World Junior Champion winning the World Junior Championships last December. His aggressive unique style of play and exuberant celebrations has been very attractive for the directors at T2APAC which will be well suited for television.

In an interview, National Team Director Yoshihito Miyazaki expressed, "We are excited to have Tomo competing in the league against some of the biggest names in table tennis. This will go a long way to build his match experience. We are confident this tournament will help his development in his bigger goal of competing for a medal at the Tokyo 2020 Olympics."

The tournament organisers are drip feeding the players names into the table tennis community with several major top players already in the line up which includes Dimitrij Ovtchaorv, Timo Boll, Joo Se Hyuk, Jun Mizutani, Chuang Chih Yuan and more!

CONFIRMED PLAYERS SO FAR:

Men:

1) Dimitrij Ovtcharov
2) Timo Boll
3) Jun Mizutani
4) Vladimir Samsonov
5) Joo See Hyuk
6) Paul Drinkhall
7) Chen Chien An
9) Aleksandr Shibaev
10) Tomokazu Harimoto

Female:

1) Feng Tianwei
2) Cheng I Ching
3) Jeon Ji Hee
4) Suthasini Sawettabut
5) Elizabeta Samara
6) Yang Ha Eun
7) Matilda Ekholm
8) Bernadette Szocs

There are 24 spots up for grabs, over the next few weeks T2APAC will be drip feeding the remaining participants to the public. Who do you think will be the remaining? Be sure to write in the comments.


UNIQUE FORMAT

T2APAC are introducing several innovative ideas to spice things up for the sport. There goal is to make the sport more spectator friendly by incorporating slow motion presentation while adopting a player draft and a unique scoring system. Time limits of 24 minutes per match will be imposed on each match. These innovative concepts will be introduced in the hopes to improve rallies but hopefully great for the spectators.

What do you think of these new concepts?

Stay tuned on TTD for all the updates from the exciting T2APAC LEAGUE for the line up, draws, seeds and more.

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Photos by: ITTF Flickr
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