Table tennis taking center stage in Paris 2024 Olympics

It’s an Olympic sport most people probably feel familiar with at first glance, but table tennis isn’t the ping pong game you played in the garage.“You have to be athletic. You have to be fluid. You have to have extremely good focus. And you have to be intelligent because playing table tennis in a match situation often is like playing chess,” said Adam Johnson. “You're trying to knock out your opponent in three moves.”Johnson is a nationally ranked competitive table tennis player.Watching elite players practice makes it look so easy. But this game is anything but simple.“These people are very, very fit, very athletic, and they have the fastest reflexes imaginable,” said Johnson of the best of the best table tennis players. “The game is reading spin. The game is high-speed spin. You've got a very, very small ball, a very small table, and a net that's six inches high. You've got to keep that in that tiny little area with great skill and dexterity and speed.”Johnson says despite this sport being an Olympic event since 1988, the game has never seen much success or support in the U.S.“The United States has never had focus on table tennis, basketball or baseball. Sports like that. Football especially dominates the sports scene in this area,” he said. “When you see the media, you can see all of their focus and attention is on those principal sports. Table tennis is very, very low. So we really can't compete on the world scene.”One country has absolutely dominated table tennis at the Olympics. China has 32 gold medals to their credit, with South Korea, the next closest country, claiming just three.Hung Tran also plays competitively. He’s a high-level table tennis coach and even coached the Vietnam Women’s National Team in the 1990s.Tran’s playing days date back decades.“In my country, Vietnam, a lot of people played table tennis because it's cheap and easy for finding friends, things like that,” Tran said. “I’d see some good player play, and I see that, and I follow them.”For these two, and for so many others, table tennis deserves to be played on a bigger stage. When played at a high level, It is a demanding test in many ways. They’re looking forward to watching that test put on display for the world to appreciate in Paris.“Some players can power the ball 100 miles per hour over only nine feet, and the top-level player will see that and return the ball repetitively,” Johnson said. “It's quite amazing to see. You'll see at the U.S., at the Paris Olympic Games.”