Table tennis world team championships canceled in 2020 over COVID-19

SEOUL - The 2020 ITTF World Team Table Tennis Championships was canceled amid the COVID-19 resurgence in South Korea, the International Table Tennis Federation (ITTF) announced on Tuesday.

The ITTF executive committee met Monday with representatives from the continents to cancel the championships, originally scheduled to take place in March in Busan, the South Korean southeast port city.

The competition was already postponed three times this year in light of the COVID-19 pandemic. The daily number of infections here have hovered around 1,000 in recent days, raising the total cases to 51,460 as of midnight Tuesday.

President of the Korea Table Tennis Association (KITA) Ryu Seung-min was informed by the South Korean authorities that it would not allow major international sporting events over the next few months.

The ITTF said in a statement that the 2021 World Table Tennis Championships will be held after the Tokyo Olympic and Paralympic Games, saying it will announce the finalized details of the event in January.

In addition, the ITTF executive committee approved the 2021 world rankings, the document of which will be made public later this week together with an event schedule for the first part of 2021 leading up to the Olympic Games.

The ITTF said the new world rankings will see the WTT Grand Smash events have equal world ranking points to the Olympic Games and World Table Tennis Championships.