Table Tennis Was Deliberately Slowed Down — Three Times

A governing body arguing with its own sport

Most rule changes try to make a sport better at what it already does. Table tennis is the clearest case of the opposite: a federation deciding its sport had become too good at being fast, and legislating against it.

Date	Change	Purpose
1 October 2000	Ball 38mm → 40mm	slower ball, longer rallies
2008	Speed glue and boosters banned	remove artificial speed and spin
2014	Celluloid → plastic, marked 40+	slow the game further

Three interventions, one direction of travel.

The ball got bigger because the sport got unwatchable

By the late 1990s elite table tennis had a problem that was not about the players. Points were being decided in one or two strokes, at speeds a television camera struggled to convey and a spectator could not follow.

The response, effective 1 October 2000, was to increase the ball from 38mm to 40mm.

The physics is less dramatic than the effect. Initial velocity drops only about 1–2% — a bigger ball leaves the racket at almost the same speed. What changes is what happens afterwards: greater air resistance, so the ball decelerates more on its way across the table, and an estimated 5–20% less spin.

Spin is the important number. Table tennis is not primarily a speed sport; it is a spin sport, and reducing how much spin a player can impart reduces how unreturnable a serve or opening loop can be. Rallies extend not because the ball is slow, but because it is less lethal.

Then they took away the glue

Speed glue was the sport’s open secret: solvents applied to racket coverings that expanded the sponge layer, adding speed and spin. Players reglued before matches; the effect faded over hours.

From 2008 the ITTF banned speed glues and boosters. The requirement is drawn broadly — a racket covering must be used without any physical, chemical or other treatment which would change its characteristics.

Note how that is written. It does not ban a list of substances, which would invite a search for the next one. It bans any treatment that changes the covering’s characteristics, and so covers products that did not exist when it was drafted.

That is the same drafting instinct visible in the FIH’s obstruction rule, which names third-party obstruction rather than listing the ways it might occur: describe the effect, not the method.

And then the material itself

In 2014 celluloid balls were replaced by plastic, marked 40+ to distinguish them from the celluloid 40 they succeeded.

The stated intent was, again, to reduce speed and lengthen rallies for spectators. Alongside that sat a practical reality: celluloid is flammable and increasingly awkward to manufacture and transport.

Players noticed immediately. The plastic ball behaves differently in the air and off the racket, and the transition was contested — as any change is when a generation of players has calibrated their technique to the old equipment.

What this tells you about how sports govern themselves

Three times in fourteen years, a federation made its own athletes worse at the thing they were best at. That is not a failure of governance; it is governance choosing an audience over an optimum.

The sport’s own view is unusually explicit about it. The purpose was not fairness, safety or integrity — the usual justifications for rule changes. It was watchability.

Compare that with Formula 1’s 2026 reset, which changed almost everything at once but kept combined power near 1,000 horsepower — nobody wanted slower cars. Or baseball’s pitch clock, which attacked dead time without touching how the game is played at all.

Table tennis is the rare case where a governing body concluded that the play itself was the problem, and legislated against its own equipment until the sport was legible again.

For what the rules require at the moment a point begins, see table tennis serve rules. More on the bodies that make these calls is in how sport is run.