Alojzy Ehrlich

Alojzy Ehrlich
Full name	Aloizy Ehrlich
Nationality	Poland

Alojzy "Alex" Ehrlich (1914 – 7 December 1992), also called "King of the Chiselers," was a Polish table tennis player, widely regarded as one of the best players in Polish history of this sport, who three times won silver in the World Championships.

He was a very popular athlete in interbellum Poland; in 1934 Ehrlich was placed on the 8th position in the prestigious list of 10 most popular sportsmen of Poland, made by readers of the national sports daily Przeglad Sportowy.

Ehrlich was born in 1914 in the village of Bukowsko in southern Poland (then part of the Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria, a component kingdom of Austria-Hungary). Some time later (exact year is unknown), he settled in Lwow and started playing table tennis, most probably in the mid-1920s, in the local Jewish sports club Hasmonea Lwow.

Together with Hasmonea, he won first team championships of Poland (Lwow, 1933), and became the top player of the country. In 1934 Erlich and another player from Lwow, Wladyslaw Loewenherz represented Poland in an international match staged in Danzig where they defeated Germany 7:2. The same team, Erlich and Loewenherz, represented Poland in 1935 at the Swaithling Cup competition in London where they achieved second ranking in A Group. In the same year, Erlich reached the semifinals of the World Championships, and in 1935 he won bronze in the same competition. Three times - 1936, 1937 and 1939, Ehrlich was vice-champion of the world, and he is among only four players who played in three finals without winning (together with Hungarian Laszlo Bellak Chinese Li Furong and Chinese Ma Lin ) In 1936 in Prague, he lost to Stanislav Kolar from Czechoslovakia. In 1937 in Baden, he lost to Austrian player Richard Bergmann, and two years later in Cairo, he lost to Bergmann again.

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