Host Cities Announced for T2 Diamond 2019!
Singapore, 25th March, 2019 – Just over 115 days remain until the eagerly awaited Season 2 of the T2 Diamond Table Tennis League (T2 Diamond), and today arrives confirmation of the three host cities: Johor Bahru (Malaysia), Haikou (China) and Singapore.
I n its second season, the prestigious T2 Diamond, organised in collaboration with the International Table Tennis Federation (ITTF), features 32 of the world’s best men’s and women’s players, a total prize purse of USD 1.5 million, and a progressive competition format that aims to amplify the appeal of table tennis across regions, with the Host City Selection Process as one of its main strategies.
The refined and polished T2 Diamond will start at the very place where the journey first began. The opening event in July will be held in Johor Bahru (Malaysia), the city which successfully hosted the inaugural season in 2017. Then, Event 2 in September will take place at Mission Hills Resort, in the iconic city of Haikou on the island of Hainan, while the season-ending showpiece in November will be hosted in T2 Diamond’s headquarter city of Singapore.
The unparalleled competition which awards bonus World Ranking Points to all competing players is poised to shake up the table tennis scene prior to the Olympic year. With only two more ITTF World Tour events (Qatar Open in March and China Open in May) before the qualification cut-off for the first T2 Diamond event this year, it is a sprint for players to rise to the top of the ITTF World Tour standings. Substantial focus lies on promising players taking part in T2 Diamond, which are expected to bring significant value to the host cities.
We want to prove that it is possible to build prestigious, commercially viable professional sports events that make optimal usage of existing assets within the host cities. We look at molding the T2 Diamond concept to fit uniquely into each of the city’s long-term goals to both increase the opportunities for sports tourism and community engagement through sports within the city, and to develop the global attraction of table tennis.
We are ecstatic with the level of interest from distinctive partners and cities, and would like to acknowledge their creative vision and collaborative passion to develop the event within their existing local ecosystem. We want this to be a revolutionary chapter in T2 history and we are pleased to have Johor Bahru, Haikou and Singapore to be a part of that.
We hope to see that the T2 model will prove to the market how best to commercialize table tennis. At the ITTF we are flexible and open to new ideas of taking the sport to a new level and success for the T2 events would demonstrate that there is a much better chance for table tennis to grow as fast as we’d like.”
Further details of venues in each host city will be announced in the coming months.
