Ping-pong bounces back

REUTERS

Goldfer ory McIlroy plays table tennis during a promotional presentation event at the BMW Masters 2012 golf tournament in Shanghai.

London - Few things bring supermodels and award-winning novelists together in one place. Table tennis, it seems, is one of them.

Elle Macpherson and Salman Rushdie were two of the first people to set foot inside Europe’s “first social ping-pong club”, which opened in London recently. They are among thousands of people being swept up in the great British ping-pong revival.

There are now more than 100 000 people who play table tennis once a week, according to Sport England, a number that has almost doubled in six years. Star-studded venues such as Spin in New York and Dr Pong in Berlin have been the trendy standard bearers of the game, but as London mayor Boris Johnson put it before the Olympics: “Ping-pong is coming home.”

In the past year, the first corporate ping-pong company was launched in the capital and the English Ping Pong Association (EPPA) re-formed after more than a century.

Richard Yule, chief executive of the English Table Tennis Association (ETTA), said British involvement in the sport was “massive in the 1950s, 1960s and 70s” and was now being “rediscovered by a different audience”.

Ping!, a project to boost recreational table tennis, is credited with helping to bring the game to the streets. About 300 tables were set up in the summer at London landmarks such as the British Library, Canary Wharf and the Roundhouse, as well as in Liverpool, Bristol, Sheffield, Birmingham, Leicester, Hampshire and Brighton – attracting more than 300 000 participants. The ETTA has spent £200 000 (R2.76 million) on bringing concrete tables to schools.

Yule is now in talks with leading sporting agencies on ways to promote table tennis, and is looking into a new project, called “pink pong”, focusing on getting female players involved. Enthusiasts can head to the second International Ping Pong Congress, known as Pongress, next month in Newcastle’s Cumberland Arms – home to the UK’s longest-running ping-pong night.

For Andy James, co-founder of EPPA, the attraction of the game comes down to its simplicity. “You can pick up a bat and ball and play. It doesn’t exclude anyone,” he said. “You can now play in old converted warehouses, in fancy dress, with music or film, and some people are starting to make money from it.”

Bounce, a London venue with a £2.5m price tag, hopes to exploit all this. It has a 95-seater restaurant and 14m bar, but also 17 ping-pong tables. Joe Jaques, the great-grandson of the game’s inventor, John Jaques III, and a consultant to the new club, claimed it epitomises how the “ping-pong revolution has been reborn”.

Co-founded by Adam Breeden, the club will charge teams £26 (R360) to book an hour on its tables. Kelly Sibley, Britain’s second highest-ranked female table tennis player, gave the venue her approval. She “could never have dreamt of something like this” when she started out. “It’s great. It will only bring more publicity to the sport.” – The Independent on Sunday