The Baltic Racket Sports Club hosted its latest padel event on Friday 28 August at Earls Court, bringing together 40 players along with many spectators representing 19 companies from across the shipping, broking, legal and trading communities.

It was particularly encouraging to welcome a large number of first-time participants, alongside many familiar faces from previous events.

Click here to see the full album of photos from the padel tournament.

Players represented a fantastic cross-section of the industry, including Clarksons, Fulmar, Thurlestone Shipping, MOL Drybulk, Pacific Basin, HRP, Braemar, OMV, Mavega, Affinity Shipping, Bancosta, the Baltic Exchange, Range Shipping, AM Nomikos, Birketts, Brentvale, Tatham & Co, Hartland Shipping and Sevenseas.

Our inaugural outdoor padel event began with round-robin matches across four groups, with each group winner progressing to the semifinals.

Group 1 was won by Allan Kent-Lemon and Christopher Symes of Clarksons, who faced Fulmar’s Iain Macleod and Jules Ferguson, the winners of Group 3. In an extremely tight short-set semifinal, the Clarksons pair edged through 5-4 in the deciding tiebreak.

Group 2 winners Alessandro Di Battista of Mavega and Viktor Kosturkov of Pacific Basin then faced Group 4 winners Daniel Smethurst and Harry Barber of Thurlestone Shipping. The second semifinal was equally close, with Thurlestone prevailing 5-4 to secure their place in the final.

The final continued the theme of closely fought matches, going all the way to a tiebreak before the Clarksons pair claimed the title with a 7-6 victory, winning the tiebreak 7-3.

The event once again demonstrated what the Racket Sports Club is all about: competitive padel, enjoyable networking and the opportunity to build new connections across the wider maritime community.

A huge thank you to everyone who played, supported the event and helped make our biggest and most diverse padel event to date such a success.

As always, anyone interested in joining future tennis, padel or table tennis events is encouraged to get in touch with the Racket Sports Committee.

Looking ahead, we are planning our next Padel event at Stratford on Friday 20th November so keep the date free

See you on the courts!

The Racket Sports Committee

Find out more about the Baltic Racket Sports Club