ONE | system 01/04/2024 13:38
Polk Sparrow (Private)
But in Israeli sports. Dror Polak, Israel’s best table tennis player of all time, died of cardiac arrest at the age of only 64. The late Polak, who was not feeling well recently and underwent tests, won the Israeli championship seven times and participated in five world championships as a player in the Israeli national team in the past.
In 1973, when he was 13 years old, Polak played for the Israeli national team in the World Table Tennis Championship in Sarajevo, Bosnia. At the age of only 15 Polk won the United States Open Junior Championship and a year later he went to study and play table tennis in Sweden, which in those years was a leader in the sport in question.
In 1975 Polak won the Israel Senior Table Tennis Championship for the first time. At the World Table Tennis Championship held in Tokyo, Polk managed to break into the top 64.
Polk also finished 35th in singles at the World Championships in Gothenburg, Sweden in 1985. In the same championship, he reached his record achievement in doubles, winning, together with Iris Stein, over a Korean pair, Lee Su Ye and Kim Ki Taek, who were ranked third in the world as a pair, and each of them ranked 3-5 in singles and singles, which led them to to the round of 16.
Givatayim Mayor Ran Konik eulogized: “This morning I was informed, to my great regret, by his son Or, that Dror, only 64 years old, died of cardiac arrest. The news is hard to digest, when I was chairman of the Table Tennis Association in Israel, I appointed Dror as chairman of the professional committee, he was a friend, a child prodigy in the days when the sport was famous and well-known in Israel, a great athlete and a great winner who brought great honor to Israel in countless international games” .
Folk on the left with Ran Konik (Ido Rimon)