Belgium Goes Racketlon!
Date: 2003-07-04
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Gert Peersman, Belgium's representative in the IRF, announced last week that there will be a Racketlon Belgian Open on the 2004 tour. It is the annual King of Rackets event that will adopt the Racketlon format - at least for the Elite and Class 1 tournaments, while the Amateurs tournament will probably keep the old Belgian format. The date of the event is not yet settled but at present it seems likely that it will take place at the beginning of June.

This is big news for the racketlon community. The King of Rackets event currently attracts 140 players each year and is therefore nothing less than the biggest single multi racket tournament known to Racketlon.com today. And together with the German Mehrschläger tradition it would be the biggest multi racket community outside the racketlon world - again, as currently known to Racketlon.com. Only a few months ago the Belgian tradition was not known and, as the racketlon movement keeps growing, it is more likely than not that other similar traditions in unexpected places will come to our knowledge.

The King of Rackets tournament has been organized by Jan Vercamme, commonly known as a "super organizer", every year since 1993. The format that has been used has varied somewhat over the years and the one used at the last King of Rackets in May is similar to the racketlon format in the sense that it involves straight counting where every point counts but it does not, however, contain true racketlon matches where the same two people face each other in all four sports. The event started out with play in small groups of 4 people where everybody played everybody in each sport in best of three games. (Straight counting. The first two games are played to 11. If a third game was needed it was played to 7.) All points gathered in this group play were then summed up for each player. The players that gained the most points continued to the play-off while the others were knocked out. The format of the play-off was a little different and less similar to racketlon while closer to the German Mehrschläger tradition. It contained four separate traditional knock-out tournaments, one for each of the four sports. All players that had qualified for the play-off took part in all four tournaments. The position reached in each of the tournaments gave a certain number of ranking points. These ranking points were summed up and the winner was the one with the most points. This year like last year and the two years before that his name was Bart Spiessens. Will he still be the King of Rackets after having faced the Racketlon community? For full results from this year's King of Rackets tournament see excel file.

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