Darko Jorgic beats Kanak Jha to win WTT Contender Skopje title

Darko Jorgic turned a rocky start into a championship finish, beating Kanak Jha 4-2 to win the WTT Contender Skopje 2026 men’s singles title at Sports Center Jane Sandanski in Skopje, North Macedonia. The final told a sharp story in six games: Jha burst out 11-3, but Jorgic steadied himself just long enough to wrest control of the match and close out one of the biggest results of his June run.

The turning points came in the middle of the final, where Jorgic proved better in the tightest rallies. He edged the second game 16-14 and the third 14-12, both deuce games that flipped the pressure back onto Jha after the American had taken the opening set so convincingly. Jha stayed alive with an 11-8 win in the fourth, but Jorgic answered with an 11-8 fifth and finished the job 11-7, a stretch that showed how quickly the Slovenian could reset after losing the first game by eight points.

That composure mattered because Jha had arrived in the final with real momentum of his own. The No. 6 seed, ranked world No. 30 at entry, reached his first WTT Series final by beating Marcos Freitas 3-1, then world No. 20 Simon Gauzy in the quarterfinals, and Hiroto Shinozuka in the semifinals. In Skopje, Jha looked like a player ready to break through, but in the decisive moments Jorgic was the one who found the cleaner answers.

Jorgic, the No. 1 seed and world No. 15, moved through the draw with the same edge he showed in the final. He beat Cedric Nuytinck, Park Ganghyeon and Adrien Rassenfosse before taking a 3-2 semifinal over Anton Kallberg. With $100,000 on the line in the men’s singles event, he handled the kind of pressure that often separates a top seed from a true title winner.

The result also carried a fast-turnaround subplot. USA Table Tennis noted that Jha had beaten Jorgic at the Liebherr TTBL-Final4 in Germany only one week earlier, making this final a quick rematch with a different ending. In a WTT event that also saw Satsuki Odo take the women’s singles title, Jorgic’s win stood out for the same reason his best results usually do: when the score tightened, he was the one who looked most comfortable deciding it.