(by Steve Hopkins, photo WTT)
A week ago, 35 year old Steffen Mengel surprised the field for his first tour win at the WTT Feeder series win in Vila Nova de Gaia, Portugal. This week, Mengel returned to Germany for another WTT Feeder event (in Dusseldorf), and the result was the same – two wins in two weeks.
Like last week, Mengel was not a seeded player, so he did not receive a favorable seeding behind the strong field that included Dang Qiu, Patrick Franziska, Kristian Karlsson, An Jaehyun and others. Mengel just continues to beat the players in front of him – this week, topping Santiago Lorenzo, then Yaroslav Zmudenko, then Alvaro Robles, then An Jaehyun, then Zhou Kai – and in the final, it was Mengel over Liu Dingshuo 3-1. Mengel, who was No. 302 just a week ago – saw his ranking jump all the way up to No. 122 after last week’s win. After winning again, expect to see him inside the World’s Top 70. An amazing jump, in a very short period of time.
The Women’s title went to He Zhuojia (3-2 over Germany’s Xiaona Shan), Men’s Doubles went to Germany’s Ricardo Walther and Cedric Meissner, Women’s Doubles went to China’s He Zhuojia and Wang Tianyi, and Mixed Doubles went to China’s He Zhuojia and Zhou Kai.
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