Table tennis

Table tennis is a racket sport in which two players, or two pairs, hit a light ball back and forth across a low net on a hard table, scoring when the opponent fails to make a legal return. It is governed by the International Table Tennis Federation, which had 227 member associations in January 2026, and it has been an Olympic medal sport since 1988.

History of table tennis

Table tennis developed in the late nineteenth century, and its origins are not well documented. Several different people are credited with inventing it, but the modern game is said to have started with the celluloid ball, introduced around 1891.

Olympedia attributes that change to James Gibb, an English distance runner who held a world record and who found the celluloid ball while visiting the United States. The light, lively ball made the game a success as a domestic pastime, first known as ping pong, and a competitive sport grew out of it.

The International Table Tennis Federation, or ITTF, was formed in 1926. It began with nine founding members: Austria, Czechoslovakia, Denmark, England, Germany, Hungary, India, Sweden and Wales.

Table tennis reached the Olympic Games in an unusual way. It made its debut as a full medal sport at Seoul in 1988, even though it had never been staged as a demonstration sport, a step the International Olympic Committee usually required of new sports at that time.

Rules and gameplay of table tennis

A game is won by the first player to reach 11 points. If both players reach 10 points, the game continues until one of them leads by two. A match is played as the best of any odd number of games.

The serve changes every two points. When the score reaches 10-all, or once the expedite system is in use, each player serves one point in turn.

The expedite system starts after 10 minutes of play in a game, or earlier if both players ask for it. It is not introduced if 18 or more points have already been scored. Under it, the receiver wins the point by making 13 correct returns in a rally.

In the final game of a match, the players change ends when one of them reaches 5 points. In the final game of a doubles match, the receiving order also changes at that moment.

Olympic competition has used singles, doubles, team and mixed doubles formats. Through Paris 2024, men and women each had singles and team events, and a mixed doubles event was added at Tokyo 2020. The team events arrived at Beijing 2008 and replaced the men’s and women’s doubles that had been played before.

Equipment and venues for table tennis

The playing surface of a table is 2.74 meters long and 1.525 meters wide, and it stands 76 centimeters above the floor. The surface is uniformly dark and matt, with white side and end lines 2 centimeters wide. A standard ball dropped from a height of 30 centimeters should bounce about 23 centimeters.

The top of the net is 15.25 centimeters above the playing surface. The net posts are the same height and stand 15.25 centimeters outside each side line.

The ball measures 40 millimeters across and weighs 2.7 grams. The current Laws describe it as plastic, matt, and either white or orange, whereas the modern game began with the celluloid ball.

There is no limit on the size, shape or weight of a racket. The blade must be flat and rigid, and at least 85 percent of its thickness must be natural wood.

Rubber coverings are limited in thickness. An ordinary pimpled rubber may be no more than 2.0 millimeters thick, with 10 to 30 pimples per square centimeter, and a sandwich rubber may be no more than 4.0 millimeters thick. One side of the racket must be matt black and the other a bright color that is clearly different from both black and the ball.

Governing bodies and major competitions

The sport’s world governing body is the ITTF, whose membership grew from nine founders in 1926 to 227 associations by January 2026. At the national level, bodies such as Table Tennis England publish the Laws of Table Tennis for their players and clubs.

Table tennis is part of the Summer Olympic Games. It has also been part of the Youth Summer Olympics since the first edition in Singapore in 2010, with events for boys, girls and mixed pairs.

Los Angeles 2028 will stage a record six table tennis events. Men’s and women’s singles and the mixed doubles will continue, men’s and women’s doubles will return for the first time since Athens 2004, and a new mixed team event will take the place of the separate men’s and women’s team events.

Records and notable moments in table tennis

Since the late 1950s, China has been by far the dominant nation in the sport. As of 2024, it has won 66 Olympic table tennis medals, including 37 of the 42 Olympic titles. South Korea has won three titles, Japan one and Sweden one.

Ma Long of China holds the men’s medal record with six Olympic medals, all gold, having won each of the six events he entered between 2012 and 2024. Dimitrij Ovtcharov of Germany has also reached the podium six times, but without a gold. Zhang Jike and Fan Zhendong have three golds each.

Among women, Wang Nan, Deng Yaping, Zhang Yining and Chen Meng have each won four Olympic titles. Wang Nan leads the overall women’s medal count with five medals, a total matched by her compatriot Sun Yingsha.

Olympedia notes that Chinese dominance has become a concern for the sport, because many non-Chinese competitors were born in China and changed allegiance. The 2008 switch from doubles to team events was meant to give other nations a better chance at medals, but it had only marginal success.

Global participation in table tennis

Olympedia records table tennis players from 111 National Olympic Committees at the Games. Twelve nations or teams had won an Olympic medal in the sport through 2024.

After China, South Korea has the most medals with 20, followed by Japan with 10 and Germany with nine. Sweden has five, North Korea five, France four, and Chinese Taipei and Singapore three each, while Hong Kong and Yugoslavia have two and Denmark one.

The sport is described as widely practiced throughout the world, and its 227 ITTF member associations show how far it has spread from the homes where ping pong began as a pastime. The 2008 change from doubles to team events was aimed at widening the field of medal contenders.

Editorially reviewed by Specialty Digest Editorial TeamLast reviewed November 4, 2026Researched and drafted with AI assistanceReport an issue