Gionis, 46, Reaches European Last 16 Before Falling to Källberg

By Taki Panos

Some athletes slow down in their forties. Panagiotis Gionis seems to have skipped that part. The 46-year-old Greek defender's run at the European Table Tennis Championships in Ljubljana ended in the men's singles round of 16 on Friday, October 16, when Sweden's Anton Källberg, the No. 6 seed, beat him 4-0 (11-6, 11-9, 11-7, 11-1), as the European Table Tennis Union reported. It was a clear defeat, but the week around it said a lot more about the Greek than that scoreline does.

If you mostly follow football and basketball, here is why Gionis matters. He has played at six Olympic Games, starting with the home Games of Athens 2004 and running all the way to Paris 2024, according to the Hellenic Olympic Committee, where he now serves as an athletes' representative. He won bronze in men's singles and silver in the team event at the 2013 European Championships in Schwechat, Austria, and he is a graduate of the University of Athens dental school. Before Paris, Kathimerini noted that only three other Greek athletes had reached six Olympics.

His week in Slovenia started well. Gionis, seeded 46th, topped his qualifying group and then went through his first knockout round without hitting a ball. Denmark's Anders Lind, world No. 16 and the tenth seed, arrived from the China Smash in Beijing already sick, developed a fever and could not play, Novasports reported. That was a big match on paper, since Gionis had won both of their previous meetings. Reaching the last 32 also secured him a singles place at the 2027 World Championships in Astana, Kazakhstan, per the same report.

On Thursday evening he made the most of the opening. Facing Italy's Matteo Mutti, a No. 73 seed who had also come through the qualifying groups, Gionis won 4-0 (11-3, 11-4, 11-5, 11-4), mixing heavy spin and no-spin chops and attacking whenever he saw a loose ball, Gazzetta reported. National team coach Kostas Vatsaklis did not need to change a thing from the bench. According to the same Gazzetta report, it was the fifth time in his career that Gionis had reached the last 16 at a European individual championships.

Friday afternoon was a different level of difficulty. Källberg started hot, raced to a 7-2 lead in the first game and never let go. Gionis found more rhythm in the second, defending longer and picking his attacks, and he led 7-5, but he could not make his serves count and missed a couple of key forehand topspins, so the game slipped away 11-9, according to Gazzetta. He clawed back to 8-7 in the third before the Swede pulled away again, and the fourth was all Källberg. The Panathinaikos report on its own player told the same story.

Källberg explained exactly how he did it. "It was important to keep finding ways to put pressure on Gionis throughout the rallies," he told the ETTU. "I had to stay aggressive, find opportunities to attack even from difficult positions, and avoid giving him easy ways back into the points once I had gained the advantage." That is the whole scouting report on Gionis in two sentences. Give a classic defender time and he will chop you into knots, so you simply never give him time.

There was a nice twist on the Swedish bench too. Källberg was coached in the match by Michael Maze, the former European champion from Denmark, who faced Gionis many times during his own playing career, the ETTU noted, adding that Gionis is actually older than Maze. "I know him well, but Källberg was superb today. He did everything right," Maze said. When the coach on the other side is younger than you and you are still playing in the last 16 of a European Championships, you are doing plenty right yourself.

Losing to Källberg is no shame either. The 29-year-old won Olympic silver in the team event with Sweden in Paris in 2024 and was a European team champion a year earlier, Gazzetta recalled. He had not lost a match in singles or doubles in Ljubljana through Friday, and earlier that day he also reached Saturday's men's doubles final with Kristian Karlsson, per the ETTU. The two had met once before, in 2019, when Gionis played for Polish club Bogoria in a Champions League quarterfinal against Borussia Düsseldorf and lost narrowly, 3-2.

Gionis was the last Greek standing in Ljubljana, Gazzetta reported. In women's doubles, Katerina Toliou and Ioanna Gerasimatou reached the main draw, as did Malamatenia Papadimitriou alongside Bulgaria's Tsvetelina Georgieva, with both pairs finishing in places 17 to 32. Ioannis Sgouropoulos and Georgios Stamatouros competed in the qualifying groups, and 21-year-old Alexandros Madesis picked up valuable experience.

Those results feed straight into the ranking lists. Novasports explained that the November list will decide 11 direct places in the mixed team event at the European Games in Istanbul, and rankings also shape singles qualification. For Gionis there is a bigger target in the background. In an interview with Gazzetta, he said he "certainly dreams" of a seventh Olympic Games (translated from Greek), and Gazzetta described Ljubljana as his first international individual event since he made the final decision this summer to chase that goal.

My take: the 4-0 looks harsh, but the bigger picture is very encouraging. Gionis came in seeded 46th, reached the last 16 for the fifth time, booked his place at the World Championships and lost only to one of Europe's best players in top form. Defensive players usually fade first as the years pile up, because the legs go before the hands do. His legs clearly have not. Los Angeles 2028 is still a long road and qualifying will be brutal, but as Kathimerini put it before Paris, with him age really does look like just a number.

Next up for Gionis is club duty with Panathinaikos, whose multi-sport history reaches well beyond football and basketball, and then the 2027 World Championships in Astana, now that his ticket is booked. If you are curious where the name itself comes from, we even have a page on the Gionis surname. For more on Greek athletes in every sport, keep an eye on our Greek Sports section. The dentist is still drilling, and the rest of Europe still has to deal with him.

Sources: ETTU, Gazzetta, Novasports, Panathinaikos, Hellenic Olympic Committee, Kathimerini, Olympedia.

Image: Flag of Greece, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain).