The change of balls made by the International Table Tennis Federation (ITTF) for next year’s Team World Cup in London has raised doubts among Chinese ping pong fans.
The ITTF announced its agenda for the London tournament on its official website on Wednesday. It can be seen that the game-use balls have been changed to Double Fish V40+ -- a completely new model for the world-level event.
For Chinese athletes, this is not good news, since it will take a while to adapt to the new balls.
Changing game-use balls has become a common practice of the ITTF in recent years. Balls used at the recent World Cup, World Championships, and the ITTF World Tour were all different.
A Chinese netizen commented on social media that the ITTF is just trying to weaken China’s dominance of the sport by frequently changing the balls. However, the net user was doubted by another netizen who said that every athlete has to adapt to the new balls, not just Chinese.
Some said table tennis is the only sport that sees such a high frequency of equipment changes and even a subtle change could influence the performance of the athletes.
The ITTF might bring on the shots for table tennis games in the future, a netizen joked.
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