Chief umpire Alexander Mizin’s principle 26.06.2010
The interview with Alexander Mizin was held to a heavy applause of the stands. There are two reasons for that. Firstly the Kazan athletes were competing at that time and secondly Alexander Mizin practically had no free time – he was working non-stop at the Championship.
- Could you please tell us about the umpires training for the European Universities Table Tennis Championship?
- We started the preparation about half a year ago. We’ve made a list of candidate umpires for judging the Championship. Eventually we’ve picked the best ones. 40 umpires work at the Championship, 19 of them are internationally certified, two of them have the union certification and 19 umpires are of first class.
Moscow has hosted the World Championship recently and nearly all the internationally certified umpires have supervised this tournament. We arranged tutorial workshops for the Tatarstan umpires twice: the first one in May and the second one in Kazan two days prior to the Championship.
- How difficult was it to assemble so many certified umpires from all over Russia?
- In fact it was not difficult. We’ve done certain work in this direction and we’ve organized tutorial workshops for umpires before the Championship.
- What Russian cities do the umpires working at the Championship come from?
- There are many umpires from Moscow, Saint-Petersburg. Some of them come from Penza, Tver, Yaroslavl, Voronezh, Taganrog, Tambov, Magnitogorsk. On the whole we assembled the best umpires of Russia.
- How do you assess the tournament organization level?
- Everything is great. Although there is no perfectly organized tournament of course. But all in all everything was at high level: buses arrived in time and the hotel was excellent.
I don’t know how proper it is to comment on my work but the umpires at the Championship work well too. No athlete complained about unbalanced judging.
- What do you personally think of Kazan’s readiness for the Universiade staging?
- This Championship is a test event. We are pleased with the organization level and it’s three years prior to the Universiade. I think that the Kazan Universiade will be held without fail.
Alexey Sorokin, special correspondent
IV European Universities Table Tennis Championship
