One has never said that a spell is inherent in every end. In the case of Kilian Place, the end was even unadorned: Ljubljana, qualification for a table tennis World Cup tournament, Samuel Kulczycki, a young pole, strikes up to the match win; The place circulates its forehand and freaked out the return. Collect the towel. Shakehands in front of empty ranks. That’s it.
Perhaps place would have thought about something else if he knew at the time that this could be his last blow as a table tennis professional, most likely he would have chosen another framework for it. But he had no idea. Only now, a good one and a half years later, he knows it. Last Wednesday Kilian Ort was officially declared his career. At 28, more than 20 years after his father Josef taught him the first blows in the Lower Franconian Bad Königshofen. It was the end of a career that always commuted between two genres: between fairy tales and drama.
The key data: In the world rankings, place was in place 48. In the table tennis Bundesliga, he defeated Timo Boll, Dang Qiu, Patrick Franziska, actually all German internationals who were active there. He was a German youth champion and stood in the men’s finals. Number of his international matches: one. Number of major international events: zero. Number of injuries: later. “I have an international match more than most others,” he consoles himself on the phone and laughs. But also: “I think I had skills for more.”
Kilian won his last two Bundesliga singles, in April 2023 against Mühlhausen. Then he raised his arms again and torn the people out of his seats. But he had to struggle with intervertebral disc problems. When the syringes no longer helped, several doctors advised him to surgery. When it was clear that the procedure had done nothing, a second followed. The pain remained. They now accompany him through everyday life. “Of course I identified myself with my sport,” he says. But sport is currently out of the question.
“He was always on the go to the top tip,” says national coach Roßkopf
The Bad Königshofen location, as you know it today, would not be conceivable without Kilian. Probably there would never have been the professional Kilian place without this location, without the small town in the Rhön-Grabfeld district and its inhabitants. They have grown together. The boy’s talent showed up early. When he was twelve, he played together with his father together in the first team, Landesliga. They became masters and climbed: two years Bayernliga, then Oberliga, Regionalliga, second division. When he was 15, the Bavarian Table Tennis Association (BTTV) wanted to lure him to Upper Bavaria. The German Table Tennis Association advised him to move to Düsseldorf, where Borussia offered him to “take him under her wing”, as Place says; So the industry leader around Timo Boll. But: “I didn’t want to get away from home.”
In the VIP area of a Bundesliga game in Bad Königshofen you can quickly chat. There, sponsors and local political prominence are a few standing tables, as a Munich journalist you get a bit of recognition of investing three and a half driving lessons to report from the Franconian province. And in the same breath, the indication that, by the way, Munich is not easier for people to reach here.
A scene from the early days in the TTBL, and it does not harm her that beer glasses with wild boar motif stood on the tables and reminded of Asterix. Because then they just raised their own thing to promote the city’s son (initially with Christoph Schüller, the second home plant) and to enable him at home. Entrepreneurs, craftsmen, innkeepers, teammates, everyone packed, donated, built, organized. Like the Gallic village, they gathered around the team. That is probably why the euphoria has been so great since the rise in 2017. The association coach Cornel Borsos responsible for the region helped the BTTV, otherwise it rarely came out from Munich. The most important guide remained his father Josef, the sparring partners organized the TSV. “That shouldn’t happen often,” says Ort in retrospect, “that one with an association that nobody previously knew, so far up, and only out of voluntary structures.”
At the beginning it was difficult for him that so much was just about him. Team manager Andreas Albert once explained this with the sentence: “Kilian knows that we do everything we can.” Everything is standing and falling with him. Plays won in the first TTBL year, but it took the second half of the second season before he succeeded at home. “At some point I am desperate and thought: that doesn’t exist, you win everywhere, just not in your living room,” he recalls. It was very special that so many only came because of it. “And when the neighbor calls something in to help you …” This atmosphere later wore him.
In Bad Königshofen it turned out that people stay with them without their Kilian
At some point, place moved to Düsseldorf, where he lives with his girlfriend, a second division player. He went to the Bundeswehr. Has now started studying. His sporting progress changed with injuries. Pain in the shoulder cost him a whole year, between 2015 and 2016; Pain in the foot hindered him in the period before the first herniated disc. Cause each: unclear. It was probably his susceptibility to injury, which held the national coach Jörg Roßkopf from nomination, even when he would have been strong enough for an EM or World Cup. “He was always on the go to the top tip,” says Roßkopf, “A great competitor without respect for narrow scores or strong opponents.” A similar category as Dang Qiu, the European champion of Munich, was, “even a bit better-and Dang is now top ten players”. Again and again place fought back and tried everything again. It is all the bitter that he was no longer possible. “It may be a relief for him that it is now pronounced. He is so clever that all doors are open to him, no matter where. “
In Bad Königshofen in one and a half years of unsuccessful anxiety has turned out that people stay with them even without their Kilian. The current team is on playoff course, the squad for next season, the hall is loud and full. And they also continue their own thing: Koharu Itagaki, number two in the girls’ world rankings of the under-15 year old, is trained here in the village. The difference to the early times of Ott is that there is now a full -time coach in her father Koji.
In his second year of TTBl, Kilian Locute achieved a remarkable victory against the Austrian Daniel Habesohn: 3-2 for the young talent against the renowned veteran. Now the talent is retired – and the veteran will move to Bad Königshofen in summer, with a place of 39 Kilian itself sounds. He had had a year and a half of familiar with the situation, he says. In exceptional cases, it is more than a politeness phrase if he thanks the “huge number of volunteers” to say goodbye. He just knows them.
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