46^th World Table Tennis Championships

Osaka, Japan · April 23 - May 6, 2001

"No Smoking, No Gluing"

By Tim Boggan, ITTF and USATT Media

That first day of competition here at the Osaka World Championships I’d no sooner taken my seat on the bus to the playing hall when I saw the upfront warning—the first ever on a bus for health-conscious me—“No Smoking…No Gluing.”

My, I thought, how increasingly popular gluing has become.

So much so, as I recently discovered, that Lohest, the well-known Belgian gluemaking company, is hopefully preparing for the market a NEW kind of glue. Which, though it hasn’t been officially tested yet, has exciting possibilities.

This new glue would last not momentarily as it were, but for 48 hours!

Further, it would be non-toxic, non-flammable—“transported like water,” someone said.

The glue is applied both to the blade and the rubber, and then, before the racket is used, the solvent must be allowed to dry not for several minutes as is the case now, but for six hours!

Since the present speed glues will sooner or later ruin the rubber, it remains to be seen—for both the amateur and the professional—just how long this new glue will be continually effective.

As to the cost of it, the new glue may be twice as expensive as the old, yet because of the need over time to use much less of it, it will still be cost-effective to the player.

If this new glue is effective, you’ll no longer see on any bus to the playing hall the sign “No Gluing”—for the ITTF will ban ALL gluing not only at the playing site but anywhere near it. Won’t they?

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