Hans-Kristian Vittinghus

Aarhus Elite - TSS

As I told you in my latest update I had another league match on thursday. Once again the team made a splendid performance and won 5-1 in a very tough away fixture against Aarhus Elite. Unfortunately the one match we lost was my singles...

I played Anand Pawar, an Indian same age as me. Played him a few times before and beaten him every time, but in close matches. This time it was the other way around as he won a really close match 21-17 in the decider. I think I was a bit unlucky to lose the first set, but I just have to admit that I made too many unforced errors and didn't take my chances. Anand on the other hand, did exactly that. He took his chances when he got them and that makes him a deserved winner of the match.

We got the three points we came for and that's more important than personal succes in this matter, so I'm not going to let this loss affect me in a bad way.

Greve Grand Prix

The proof of what I just stated above about not letting it affect me in a bad way came as quickly as this weekend...

I took part in a danish elite tournament, called Greve Grand Prix. We only have two of these every year, so they are always pretty strong, this one was no exception as only Gade, Jan Ø. Jørgensen and Joachim Persson was absent from the mens singles. A few foreigners made the entry even stronger, so it was about the level of a weaker Int. Challenge tournament. Not bad for a domestic tournament I would say!

Ok ok maybe I'm trying to make it sound stronger than it was, just because I won it! But I did beat some quality players in Kasper Ipsen and Peter Mikkelsen to get the title. The win against Peter came a bit easier than expected as he unfortunately had to pull out with an injury after the first set.

Even though I won in singles I will still remember this tournament for something completely different!

For the first time in a very long time I played mens double... My very good friend Scott Evans had asked me if I wanted to play with him, just for the fun of it. And fun it turned out to be!

We didn't really expect anything but having fun, but somehow we managed to beat Mikkel Delbo and Jacob Chemnitz who have made some very decent results on the EBU-circuit, winning a few challenges and was ranked inside top 30 in the world at one point.

(Scott and myself pictured with the president of Badminton Leinster (I think!) back at a exhibition about a year ago)

We ended up losing in three sets in the semifinal to Christian Skovgaard and Mikkel Elbjørn who are two of the guys the danish federation is counting on. So I think we can be happy with our performance considering we are both single players... And even more importantly we had so much fun playing. I really enjoyed it so much, even if it was tough playing 8 matches over 2 days!

That's it for now, I need to get some rest

HK