After a year of qualifying we’re finally there, the FIR Race will kick off in Zurich today and we couldn’t be more excited! The group stages will be played in the new and exciting Racketlon Sprint format on the Friday, and the traditional Racketlon scoring will be used on Saturday for the semi-finals. The top two seeds are 1 in their groups and the rest of the players were drawn yesterday.
The winners of the World Championships automatically qualified which is why Stine Jacobsen is ranked #1. She heads group A and will face Kirsten Kaptein, Adeline Kilchenmann and Nathalie Vogel. Kaptein and Kilchenmann will start the FIR Race at 15:30 and are followed by a battle of World Champions as Jacobsen and Vogel play each other in their first group match.
Pauline Cavé has had a breakthrough season as she won multiple titles and climbed up to the world no 2 position. She’ll take on Anna-Klara Ahlmer, Joyce Chan, and Sandra Ettenauer in group B. The first match is at 16:00 with Ahlmer taking on Chan, followed by Cave vs Ettenauer.
For the men’s draw, Sylvain Ternon comes in as the no 1 seed, he had an amazing season clinching several titles and gaining the world no 1 position for the first time in his career. He is set to play Nicolas Lenggenhager, Michal Kurek and Bastian Böhm in Group A. Michal and Bastian have had good results this year to qualify for the FIR Race and it’s exciting to see how they’ll get on in the new sprint format.
Group B consists of Joerg Kanonenberg, Kresten Hougaard, Mandrin Mouchet and Kevin Ng and we can get ready for some very exciting matches. Joerg and Kresten had a big battle in India were Joerg managed to beat Kresten for the first time. Kevin Ng and Mandrin Mouchet have been putting in strong performances as well and will be looking to start strong today.
Make sure to tune into Streamster.TV to catch all the action live! We also have a special guest commentator tomorrow, SquashTV’s own Johnny Williams who has been former world no 15 and has coached several top players including Joel Makin! An exciting day ahead tomorrow.
Watch live: https://streamster.tv/events/world-tour-finals-2024-1
