Table Tennis Banned a Type of Glue Because Players Kept Getting Sick

Walk into a table tennis hall before a major tournament in the 1990s, and you’d smell something strange: hundreds of players gluing their paddles, filling the room with toxic fumes.

This wasn’t cheating exactly. It was completely legal. It was also, it turned out, genuinely dangerous and for years, players had no idea just how serious the risks really were.

How glue became a performance tool

The trick started with a Yugoslav player named Dragutin Šurbek, who popularized “speed glue” between 1979 and 1983. The glue soaked into the paddle’s spongy surface underneath the rubber, making the whole racket noticeably faster and giving shots more spin. Even a slow, basic paddle could suddenly become genuinely dangerous in a rally.

Once players saw how much of an edge it gave, speed gluing spread everywhere. Players carried glue bottles, brushes, and hair dryers to every match, reapplying glue between games to keep their paddle at peak speed. It became such a normal part of competition that some players felt they couldn’t compete fairly without doing it too.

The health problem nobody wanted to see

The glue’s chemical fumes weren’t just unpleasant. They contained genuinely harmful compounds, including chemicals linked to cancer and other serious health risks.

One Japanese player reportedly collapsed while gluing his paddle and spent six days in a coma, an incident that finally forced table tennis’s governing body to act seriously.

The International Table Tennis Federation first restricted the most dangerous chemicals back in 1995. That wasn’t enough. In 2007, following continued health concerns, the organization banned speed glue outright, giving players one final chance to use it at the 2008 Beijing Olympics before the ban took full effect. For many players, the danger had been hiding in plain sight for years before anyone acted.

A ban that changed how the sport is played

Removing speed glue didn’t just protect players’ health. It also slowed the game down slightly, since paddles could no longer be artificially sped up through glue. Some fans and players welcomed that change, arguing it made rallies easier to follow and more balanced between offense and defense.

Manufacturers responded by developing new rubber sheets designed to mimic some of speed glue’s performance benefits without any of the toxic chemicals, a technical race that continues today.

What replaced it

Manufacturers eventually developed tensor technology, built directly into the rubber sheet itself rather than applied separately through glue, giving players a similar speed and spin boost without any toxic fumes involved.

That shift meant equipment innovation in table tennis moved from something players did themselves before every match to something built entirely into the product they bought, changing the sport’s relationship with its own gear in a way that’s proven permanent.

Should sports ban performance-boosting equipment mainly because of health risks to the athletes, even if the equipment itself isn’t considered cheating under the sport’s actual rules?