Wandsworth Paralympic Table Tennis medallist and 2016 hopeful Aaron McKibbin has swept the prize board at this year’s National BTTAD Open Championships. Months of intense training have well and truly paid off, with McKibbin taking home a win in his category and silver in doubles as well as the overall Men’s prize. Aaron is naturally delighted with his success and his sponsors, South West London Estate Agents James Pendleton, have been promoting the win on a dedicated blog: aaronmckibbin.com After the successes of 2012 Aaron spent the beginning of this year in Sheffield where the Team GB training base is located. The National Open Championships is the first national competition of the year and was attended by the country’s greatest players: fellow medallists Will Bailey and Ross Wilson were amongst those fighting Aaron for the overall prize.
The championships began with a series of matches covering each category or ‘class’ of athletes. Aaron is grouped within the ‘class 8’ category and sailed through to the final to secure his first win. The doubles silver award was McKibbin’s second positive result of the weekend and with some of the UK’s brightest Table Tennis stars in attendance two prizes would have been an impressive enough haul. However, Aaron’s win in the overall title games is a fantastic and hard fought achievement given that players from all categories compete. There could scarcely be a better beginning to an athlete’s journey to the 2016 Paralympics.
McKibbin’s route to Rio will unfold over a series of national and international tournaments, with the overall aim of keeping his national and world rankings at their current level or higher until the qualifiers in 2015. The Open National win paves the way for the first of Aaron’s international tournaments and neither he nor sponsors South West London Estate Agents James Pendleton could have hoped for a better start to the year.
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