The International Table Tennis Federation Executive Committee met in Amman, Jordan, looking forward to the upcoming ITTF Summit, and to exchanging with the table tennis family in person for the first time in years.

Greeting the committee was IOC Member HRH Prince Feisal Al-Hussein from Jordan. Prince Feisal is the President of the Jordan Olympic Committee and represented the gracious hosts of Jordan who are staging the inaugural ITTF Summit.

The newly elected co-chairs of the ITTF Athletes’ Commission Sharath Kamal Achanta and Liu Shiwen took part in their first Executive Committee meeting.

Created in 2019, the “Home of Table Tennis” plan was aimed at finding the global Home of Table Tennis, comprising offices for the ITTF Group, a Training Centre, a High-Performance & Development base. However, the COVID-19 put the plan on pause, leading the federation to reassess many of its key tenets.

The Executive Committee discussed how best to approach the project, realizing that centralizing all the venues is inefficient in the post-COVID world.

Going forward, the ITTF will work with cities around the world on a targeted dialogue to begin the process of selecting final hosts of the different venues, instead of the traditional bid process. Executive Vice President Masahiro Maehara has been tasked with working on the review of the project said that these decisions will continue to move the project forward and still provide the mutually beneficial partnerships that the ITTF had been seeking.

“Regarding Home of Table Tennis, the plan so far was to set up all the facilities necessary for table tennis in one place. But due to Covid-19, it would be a big risk; the world has changed drastically, and it became impossible to do this. That is how the idea of distributing the facilities came up,” Maehara said.

The Executive Committee will present its plans during the ITTF Summit on Dec. 5 in the final session of the day.