A young British squad of Pathway and Development players finished the 2017 PTT Spanish Open Ciutat del Prat on a high with Alex Bland and Lee Wilkinson taking gold in the men’s class 7 team event.
Lucie Bouron and Sweden’s Anna-carin Ahlquist took silver in women’s class 2-5 and Marc Bonnar crowned his international debut with a bronze medal in the men’s 1-2 team event with Argentinian partner Guillermo Bustamante Sierra.
Bland and Wilkinson won their first two matches in the round-robin men’s class 7 event against Norway/Austria (2-1) and Spain (2-0). Their final match against Sweden was to decide the gold and they defeated Sam Gustafsson and Noah Olsson 2-0 to add the gold to the bronze medals they won in the singles.
Bouron and her illustrious partner Ahlquist, the class 3 world No 1, topped their group in women’s class 2-5 with 2-0 wins against Thailand and a combined team from Thailand and the USA. They came through their semi-final against France 2-0 but found the Brazilian partnership of Joyce Oliveira and Catia Da Silva Oliveira just too strong in the final.
Bonnar and Bustamente Sierra began with a 2-0 win against Chinese Taipei followed by a 2-0 loss to Thailand but they progressed from the group in second place with a 2-1 win against France. They lost to the Irish/Spanish combination of Colin Judge and Miguel Toledo in the semi-final 2-0 but Bonnar can be very proud of taking a medal in his first international event.
Dan Bullen, silver medallist in the men’s class 5 singles, was out of luck in the team event as he and partner Tommy Urhaug progressed from their group thanks to a 2-1 win against Russia but were knocked out in the quarter-finals by the first Chinese Taipei team (2-0).
Conor McAdam and Junki Itai from Japan finished third in the round-robin men’s class 6 team with one win from three matches – 2-0 against Ireland – but only two medals were awarded.
In men’s class 8 Declan Tobin and Irishman Patrik Vaughan lost their matches to Sweden, Japan, Indonesia and Norway 2-0 while Craig Allen and Elliott Medland went out of men’s class 10 at the group stages after a 2-0 loss to Japan and a 2-1 loss to Spain.