GUYANA’S Shemar Britton, Kyle Edghill and Trenace Lowe all earned gold medals over the weekend at the Jamaica Winter Open Table Tennis Championships, which ended on Sunday at Montego Bay Community College, Jamaica. 

Also medalling at the inaugural event was veteran Colin France, who landed silver in the Men’s Over-50 singles and bronze in the Over-40 singles. Young Miguel Wong took silver in the Under-15 Boys’ singles while Britton, Edinho Lewis and Wong all ended with bronze medals.
Lewis and Britton shared bronze in third place in the Men’s singles, with the ultimate victory going to France’s Damien Provost who walked away with the US$1500 prize money Second place US$800 prize went to Dominican Republic’s Emit Santos.
It was Provost whom Lewis came up against in the semi-finals and lost 0-4, after the Guyanese had earlier disposed of Jamaica’s Paulton Madden 4-2 in the quarterfinals.
Britton had a quarter-finals match against USA’s Bin Chu, where he prevailed 4-3, before his match against Santos proved more than he could handle, as he went down 2-4 to the Caribbean Men’s singles champion.
Santos had earlier ousted Guyana’s Nigel Bryan who put up quite a fight by winning two games, before he succumbed.
In other performances by Guyanese in the Men’s singles, Edghill, Joel Alleyne and Elishaba Johnson all made it through to the round of 16.
Britton’s gold came from his win in the Men’s Under-21 singles, while Edghill championed the Boys’ 18-and-under category and Lowe ruled in the Women’s singles taking out Jamaica’s Yvonne Foster in an easy 4-0 victory.
Miguel was settled to his second place finish after he lost 2-3 to Jamaica’s Alessio Tulloch. Colin finished third in the Boys’ 11-and-under category and France reached the final in the 50 years and over, but lost 1-3 to Jamaica’s Keith Evans.
The proud team returned to Guyana last Monday night, with the exception of Lowe who returned to the USA. On their return, president of the Guyana Table Tennis Association (GTTA) Godfrey Munroe, expressed his extreme satisfaction with the team’s performance.
“I believe it was a great result for the players,” Munroe said, adding that he was not only pleased with the players’ performance, but glad that they got the opportunity to see where they stand against competition in the region.
“We wanted to provide the opportunity for them to gain some much-needed exposure, develop their technical and tactical abilities against regional and international counterparts to assess where they are competitively and to plan as to what would be required to move then along to be more competitive and dominant, given this is the next generation of players from whom our national representatives would come.”