cashew | Table Tennis kerfluffle (Reply)

I was not following the table tennis news, but apparently there's been some serious kerfluffle over the Tokyo Olympic's table tennis court size.

According to the head coach of the Chinese table tennis team, the athletes complained about the small size of the courts during warm-ups last week (July 21st). The coach, Liu Guoliang, then measured the courts and confirmed that it is indeed smaller than regulation. Table tennis courts use the "ratio" system (number of dividing boards used to encircle the court), with non-finals games played on 7x14 courts and finals played on 8x16 court size. The measurement for the Tokyo Olympic table tennis courts were 6x11.

The smaller court size means that Chinese athletes cannot accelerate at their usual pace safely due to the lack of space. This heavily impacts Chinese table tennis tactics, as one of their strong points is using the full width and depth of the court through their higher acceleration. This especially affects the men's team's performance due to the high reliance on this acceleration in their strategies. This acceleration is the meta which allowed Chinese table tennis athletes to dominate over foreign athletes, as this strategy has yet to be widely adopted by other countries.

Liu has lodged an official complaint, but it was too late to change the venue size.

As I have seen, the male Chinese table tennis athlete had played poorly through out the mix doubles tournament, as Liu said he would be the most impacted.

Remember, all of this was complained about five days ago. Well before the competition began.

So, that does help explain a bit more about why the performance was so terrible.

And that reminds me that the crew team complained about the water for sculls (rowing) was not properly desalinated, which changed the friction coefficient and buoyancy on their tiny boats. This complaint was lodged by multiple teams, as sculls teams practice and compete in fresh water.

Just another example of the arena being very poorly regulated in this Olympics.