"Table tennis is very good for the mind as well as the body, whatever age you are, says 73-year-old Wang Qi, the oldest competitor at the Table Tennis Team World Championships in London. Incredibly the Fiji player, who hails from China, is 61 years older than the youngest player, Enya Hu, from Switzerland. Age is evidently no barrier in this increasingly popular sport."
"Table tennis has come a long way since the early days when the Victorian parlour game was played on dining tables with cork balls and a row of books in lieu of a net. As Boris Johnson joked during the Olympic handover prior to the 2012 Games: Other nations looked at a dining table and saw an opportunity to have dinner; we (England) looked at it and saw an opportunity to play whiff whaff."
"After technological improvements including the adoption of a plastic ball, the International Table Tennis Federation was founded by Ivor Montagu, (later unmasked as a communist spy), and the first world championships was staged in 1926 at Memorial Hall in London."
Table tennis attracts competitors of all ages, with 73-year-old Wang Qi from Fiji representing the oldest player at the Table Tennis Team World Championships in London, while 12-year-old Enya Hu from Switzerland is the youngest. The tournament features 380 men and women competing at the Copperbox and Wembley Arenas, showcasing exceptional reflexes and dexterity. This year marks a century since the first world championships in 1926. The sport has evolved significantly from its Victorian origins as a parlour game played on dining tables with cork balls and books as nets, to a globally recognized sport with standardized equipment and international governance through the International Table Tennis Federation.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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