DURBAN, South Africa, May 20 (silubaba) -- Steve Dainton, CEO of the International Table Tennis Federation (ITTF) Group, said the World Championships' long-awaited return to the African continent is one of the efforts to make table tennis global.
"It's super important," Dainton said on Saturday as the 2023 ITTF World Table Tennis Championships (WTTC) Finals kicked off in Durban, South Africa, marking the first time that the prestigious event was held in Africa since 1939.
"Table tennis is a huge sport all around the globe. We want to be one of the biggest sports worldwide, so it's really important that we take our biggest event, the World Table Tennis Championships, to all parts of the world," commented Dainton.
"To have an event here in Africa, in South Africa, in Durban, and the first time back in this continent after 84 years, is really amazing for us," he added.
Prior to Durban, the 2021 table tennis worlds took place in Houston, the United States. With two successive editions of the event being held outside of Asia and Europe, the move reflects table tennis going global.
"In table tennis, we made a lot of changes in the last few years, with World Table Tennis (WTT) starting Grand Smashes. We see the chance to take our World Table Tennis Championships to really different parts of the world," said Dainton.
"That [the Houston worlds in 2021] was the first time since the Cairo event in 1939 that we were outside of Asia and Europe, so it was a super important milestone. We also made some reforms to our World Championships to allow us to be able to move around," the ITTF official added.
"We hope in 2027 we can go maybe to Latin America or Oceania because it's really important to become a global sport."
Watching the opening day action, Dainton felt the atmosphere at the Durban International Convention Center was "excellent."
"Africa has some kind of souls, some spirit that we don't find in other parts of the world. They've really done a fantastic job to put together one of our biggest events, the World Championships. Everything is running very smoothly and it's going perfectly.
"It gives us, the table tennis family, a really different experience because we have never really been in this part of the world. We can feel the warmth and the friendship from the African friends. That maybe will give us some surprising results on the table as well," Dainton concluded. ■
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