OOAK Table Tennis Forum

Saw this interesting topic on another forum. Seems the ITTF is currently making claims in this video that a table tennis smash can go up to 170 km/h. However the winner of an ITTF “World Fastest Smash Competition” in 2003 could only manage a smash of 112.5 km/h, and that was with the faster 38mm ball.

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Well, ovtcharov can hit faster, but nowhere near the speed the ITTF mentions:

http://www.tabletennisdaily.co.uk/forum/showthread.php?5204-Dimitrij-Ovtcharov-Hits-122kph-Ball!

ITTF=amateurs or ITTF=lying *******

I've measured my own smash from frames on a high speed camera and it was over 120km/h and I only hit two smashes... , I'm no pro so 112 is pretty useless. That was only like two years ago with the 40mm at age 40 with a off blade and Haifu whale two.

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Donic defplay senso
Haifu whale soft (grips-euro)
Nittaku pimplemini 1.0mm

Yeah, but you are a freak of nature!

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I wouldn't say they are lying, especially because you'd need to do what foam did and do a frame analysis as the ball rebounds off the bat, not a radar setup 3 meters away (amateur method)

For example, GBR says fastest badminton smash in competition is 322kph, fastest smash is 421kph. 3 meters later it's probably only doing 100...

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Chasse Patate

Also it slows down very quickly... the deceleration is much higher at high speed, so the speed when it leaves to bat may be much higher than the measure speed, which is an average over time.

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Nah ... it's pretty much a lie - an exaggeration if you want to be kind. The vast majority of good data puts ball speeds below 70mph. These things are documented on the ITTF's own site.

I put this page together 10 years ago and have been waiting ever since for someone to show up with evidence of a substantially faster smash. The video of Ovtcharovs smashing at 75mph is the first I've seen in 10 years of a smash beyond 70mph. 105mph seems more than just doubtful.
http://www.jayandwanda.com/tt/speed.html

It takes a fully grown male athlete like Ovtcharovs using a setup ball to the side of the table to get a documented 75mph smash. 105mph simply doesn't happen in table tennis matches. An 70mph smashes, while possible, are uncommon.

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Jay Turberville
http://www.jayandwanda.com
Hardbat: Nittaku Resist & Dr. Evil

Counter-intuitively, at a high enough speed, the drag coefficient of a sphere drops dramatically from around 0.5 to 0.2 or maybe lower. So a at a certain threshold, the deceleration actually becomes lower for a bit. This is called "drag crisis".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drag_crisis

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Jay Turberville
http://www.jayandwanda.com
Hardbat: Nittaku Resist & Dr. Evil

Yes we used a setup ball so that I could absolutely cream it with a flat kill, you wouldn't hit such a ball in match . Although I have put flat spots in balls in matches while looping and split quite a few of them when I've got a top edge, so I'm generally getting a fair bit of arm speed compared to most people. I've got a genetic advantage having very thin bones so I don't carry much weight (good power to weight ratio), It makes like look a lot more skinny than I really am.

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Donic defplay senso
Haifu whale soft (grips-euro)
Nittaku pimplemini 1.0mm

Interesting, I did not know that I'm not sure if the speeds are high enough for this to apply though, and if not, the decelration is proportional to the velocity squared, which means it will travel fastest the instant it leaves the bat, which is harder to measure.

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yeah - I agree that we probably don't reach drag crisis with real world smashes. But for all I know, we might at 100mph. I just don't know. But I believe we don't reach drag crisis with real world smashes precisely because my ball speed calculator doesn't account for that and it seems to keep coming back with reasonable results that match the real world measurements using other methods (radar gun, high speed video).

While the ball speed may be hard to measure at the very instant the ball leaves the racket, we can calculate how much the air drag slows the ball down over specific time intervals. I did that on the 112km/h video that was posted earlier in this thread. I measured the time interval between smash and when the ball hit the table and let my online calculator tell me how far the ball would travel given that initial speed. It gave a distance of 6.8 feet which seems pretty close to what we see on the video. I had visually estimated the distance to be roughly 6 feet or 2 meters (which is pretty close to 6.8 feet).

So if I had merely used the time interval measurement (very accurate by looking at the sound recording in a sound editing program) and gone to more trouble to estimate the distance from smash point to where the ball hit the table, I would have come up with an initial ball speed very close to what the speed gun measured just by knowing the average velocity of the ball over a given distance. So while the ball does slow down rapidly, the rate at which is slows down is fairly predictable and calculable. My simple calculator gets us in the ballpark of what is correct. There's no reason to expect errors of a degree that would lead us to believe what the ITTF video shows.

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Jay Turberville
http://www.jayandwanda.com
Hardbat: Nittaku Resist & Dr. Evil

Yes you're right... since it's a 'smooth' deceleration, so you should be able to calculate the speed straight after impact.

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