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Of course: Hiroji was the first person to use a sponge on his racket, a common feature of all modern table tennis rackets. Although, at the time it may have seemed as though this technological advancement gave him an unfair advantage, it has truly brought table tennis into the modern age and as...

It really boils down to the clash of play styles. There's a bunch of modern players who like to run around: Gauzy, Alexis, Jang Woojin, lots of japanese, etc. And they all struggle against players efficient at/on the table: Falck, Harimoto and, as it turns out, Luka. These modern players are...

It's the problem of the Gauzy's style actually. He won vs Xu Xin in 2019 just to be absolutely annihilated by Falck. Playing too far away from the table just naturally gets punished.

…and gets beaten by #148, which proves exactly what? Luka won against Gauzy and Uda in Bundesliga.

I always thought it's VOC making a glue the speed glue. The guy, which started reglueing his rubbers didn't use anything special, just a normal glue. Basically, a "good solvent", which is VOC in our context of hydrophobic polymers, should make sponge expand. "Normal" means different in...

Ah, this actually makes a lot of sense, I do this naturally executing chiquita where the FH leg goes under the table and extends throughout the stroke giving it power. I should try this for other backhands then. Thanks, blahness your stuff is always illuminating.

Table tennis historically was about arms race. It started with pips, then inverted and sponges, speed gluing, new sponge technologies, carbon blades—you name it. Eventually we got this tremendous spin levels that we have now. If some smart**s came up with a ruling that coverings must be no...

Ok, that's not going to be easy. I wear European 46, Mizunos are 46, ft igre are 47, asics I wear on the street are 48. Mizunos and xiom are both 30.0 in Japanese sizing. Hope, you can make something out of it.

I'll just note for the record that it's about this much you care about fairness in the national teams when it's not about poking CNT.

LJK did the same in one of the mock Olympics. The explanation was that he incorrectly boosted one of the rubbers, I believe.

Sure, it was still different generation, but I meant things like this: Not sure if the timing in the embedded video is correct. Last game, 12:6.

Having learned that I have to question once again whether Falck really is/was a fluke, rather than a glimpse of a hyper-novel style. Modern offensive players tend to backpedal quite far away from the table: Calderano, Lebrun, Gauzy, attacking their loops with short pips makes sense again...

Thanks, I didn't know. Of course, most of such accounts will have a lot of backwards rationalizations, especially from a layman like me—I'm very aware of it. It usually takes a work of a proper historian to dig up all the details and show the real, nuanced story. Nevertheless, if you look at...

I think I should add how and why Chinese lost for the completeness, after all it was my main question in this thread. This touches on tactics and the limits of the game at that age. CNT played pips basically on the table, whereas Europeans played topspins much farther away from the table...

I think you take Olympics a little too seriously. The results there are always worse than in other international competitions. All the records are worse and a lot of Olympic sports are not even to be considered seriously. And yes, that's a political story: it's the competition of nations. And...

Ok, I looked a little deeper into this story and the pivoting moment was WTTC in Dortmund, where in singles won Waldner, silver Persson and Grubba and Yu Shentong with bronze. In the team event Chinese lost to Swedes 0-5 and it looks like that was the last straw. The old CNT was dissolved and...

This would basically mean that they dropped all pips for a single fluke. No second guessing. I find it hard to believe. I could assume a delay in decision-making, but I could equally likely assume the conspiracy here, I agree. I don't think so. All the changes seem to be in the direction of...

I thought about something like this, but the timeline doesn't match. For Kong Linghui to win in Sydney they'd had to start training him seriously long before. Hidden serves appear disgraceful to me, no sportsmanship whatsoever. And then Europeans were feeding from them a lot as well, this ban...

It's not quite an appeal to authority. I personally ask the question about CNT back then, on the verge of nineties–nineties. They all play pips (obviously optimizing a lot of things and NXL and HZW are the remnants of that era. I can't say HZW is mediocre in any part of the game), they don't...

Logic is the first victim of these threads, but bear with me: if you can find a pips player on Ma Long's level you can make the valid pips vs inverted comparison. You can't find such a player—you can't make such a comparison.