SABINE AUKEN and Daniela Von Armin (Germany) have retained their women's pairs title at the Generali European Bridge championship. They had also won in Portugal two years ago.
The world's ranking No 1 players edged ahead in the last round to win from Golin and Olivieri of Italy, with Cohen and Zuccherelli, France, third.
Ireland's Teresa Rigney and Hilary Dowling-Long were 10th. They had qualified in third place for the 28th pairs final, during which they see-sawed between third and eighth place for most of the time. The final was played as a barometer pairs, with every table playing the same boards simultaneously. The up-to-the-minute results were, therefore, known after every round.
Rigney and Dowling-Long, members of Dublin's Bankers and Regent Bridge Clubs, went into bronze medal position halfway through the last set. Approaching the last table they were fifth and still in with a medal chance. Unfortunately, two bad boards at the end saw them slip to 10th, the lowest they had been over the entire three days of the event. Although a disappointing end result it was, nevertheless, the best finish by an Irish pair.
In the women's consolation pairs, Valerie Hand and Ann Montwill finished 15th and Pauline Maguire and Elva Gannon 16th of the 104 participating pairs. Aileen and Rebecca O'Keeffe were 34th. Italians filled the first three places.
In the open team championship, the Irish had mixed fortunes. Well beaten by former world champions, Netherlands, 9-21, they went on to draw 15-15 with San Marino. Against championship leaders Denmark, Ireland were well down at halfway then rallied to lose narrowly 13-17.
An interesting feature of the teams' championship is that all pairs are being ranked according to their performance as calculated by the Butler scoring method. At this stage Tom Hanlon and Hugh McGann are rated 9th of the 105 pairs on the 35 teams.
The open team's next matches are against Britain and Greece. The women's team championship gets under way today when Ireland meets Finland in the first- round. The Ireland team is Aileen and Rebecca O'Keeffe, Valerie Hand and Anne Montwill, Patsy Meehan and Petra O'Neill.