BERLIN (Reuters) -The 2028 Los Angeles Olympics table tennis venue is too small for the needs of the sport amid a growing global popularity, said the head of the International Table Tennis Federation Petra Soerling on Thursday.
The table tennis competition at the 2028 Games will be held at the Los Angeles Convention Centre, a venue for several other sports during the Games, including wrestling and judo.
LA Games organisers announced the venues back in April.
For table tennis the capacity is around 7,000, Soerling said. That is a similar size to the Paris 2024 Olympics venue for the sport last year.
“In Los Angeles we think our venue is too small,” Soerling told a group of international news agencies. “The location is excellent but I am sad to say we can only be maximum seven thousand.
“We are selling out bigger venues than that. Let’s see what we can do. There is still time,” she added.
Soerling, who is running for another term as ITTF president on May 28, said the sport had witnessed growth in recent years and got a massive boost by the success of the Paris Olympics in 2024.
“We want to grow more and the momentum we saw after Paris is just the beginning,” Soerling said. “It is not only in China. It is also in other places.
“We have never seen what we are facing now. Seeing venues sold out in less than 20 minutes. We have a number one for the under-11 from Uganda. The Paris Olympics and Paralympics were sold out.”
The ITTF will also host its first Grand Smash event — the top tier tournament of the ITTF’s commercial arm World Table Tennis — in Las Vegas in July this year, the first time it has been held outside Asia. This will then be followed by a Grand Smash event in Sweden’s Malmoe in August.
“We can see there is this big appetite,” Soerling said.
(Reporting by Karolos GrohmannEditing by Christian Radnedge)
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