Last year, at the Team World Cup in Tokyo, Japan, president of the International Table Tennis Federation (ITTF) Thomas Weikert and Chief Executive Officer Steve Dainton, were upbeat about their plans and vision for the sport going forward.
They spoke of a number of new initiatives that the ITTF had committed itself, to provide a brighter future for the discipline internationally.
However because of the coronavirus pandemic, the ITTF was forced to halt all international activities until June 30.
“Due to the continued uncertainty caused by COVID-19 pandemic and postponement of Tokyo 2020 Olympic and Paralympic Games, the ITTF Executive Committee reached the following decisions: Suspension of all currently planned ITTF events and activities that involve international travel until 30 June 2020,” ITTF said in a statement last month.
Before the pandemic the ITTF was on its way to implement one of the initiatives taken at the ITTF’s Executive Committee meeting, which was to proceed with the World Table Tennis.
World Table Tennis will house the ITTF’s core commercial assets from 2021, with the aim to grow the sport in a much more professional way,” the ITTF said in a release.
The ITTF said it hoped to use WTT as a commercial arm to find more partners and to modernize its commercial business activities.
The goal of the ITTF is to ultimately, unlock the full potential of table tennis so that it can compete among the highest-profile sports in the world.
“Through World Table Tennis, we are endeavouring to build a platform that really benefits our athletes and fans, enabling better structured events and higher prize money. Lots of time and resources have gone into this, as it’s a huge project that will revolutionise our sport for good. The professionalisation of our core top products is something that had been missing in our sport – this is a great moment for table tennis,” said Dainton.
Weikert added: “We are committed to following our new strategy. We must be transparent, uphold good governance and make sure that all of our stakeholders can follow our steps forward. We want that players are more satisfied by prize money and events themselves, while we also want to support our members by making more money to reinvest into the development of our key stakeholders.”
Weikert said that the ITTF has grown a lot as an organization.
“We have grown tremendously as an organisation since June 2017 and we now have over 70 full-time staff members. Our strategy now is to centralise the workforce in one location to allow for more efficient operations. What’s great is that we have received significant interest from some very big cities which interest us.”
Dainton said the organization had taken a professional approach to improving the sport.
“We have adopted a professional approach to our search for a future ‘Home of Table Tennis’ with the consultation of Deloitte, Withers LLP and HASSELL. Due to the high level of interest, we are sure that we will end up somewhere great but we needed to make sure we invested in this with a professional approach to ensure we get the best outcome.
This won’t just be any old-style headquarters.
We want our future property to have plenty of table tennis activity, in contrast to our current home.”
Established in May 2018, the ITTF Foundation grew significantly in 2019, celebrating the inauguration of its headquarters in Leipzig (Germany), in September.
From this central base, the foundation is coordinating CSR activities internationally to help make the world a better place through table tennis.
Weikert said: “With the headquarters opening in Leipzig, the ITTF Foundation is hiring more staff and running more projects than ever before, most notably a first ever World Parkinson’s Table Tennis Championships, held in New York. Meanwhile to mark World Table Tennis Day (held every year on 6th April), the ITTF Foundation focused its efforts on the Slum Ping Pong initiative to leave a positive legacy through table tennis in Kampala (Uganda). CSR activities of this kind are set to multiply in future.”
