trip to the US in 1901 and found them ideal for the game. This was followed by E.C. Goode who, in 1901, invented the modern version of the racket by fixing a sheet of pimpled, or stippled, rubber to the wooden blade. Table tennis was growing in popularity by 1901 to the extent that tournaments were being organized, books were being written on the subject, and an unofficial world championship was held in 1902. In those early days, the scoring system was the same as in lawn tennis. Although both a "Table Tennis Association" and a "Ping Pong Association" existed by 1910, a new Table Tennis Association was founded in 1921, and renamed the English Table Tennis Association in 1926. The International Table Tennis Federation (ITTF) followed in 1926. London hosted the first official World Championships in 1926. In 1933, the United States Table Tennis Association, now called USA Table Tennis, was formed. In the 1930s, Edgar Snow commented in Red Star Over China that the Communist forces in the Chinese Civil War had a "passion for the English game of table tennis" which he found "bizarre". On the other hand, the popularity of the sport waned in the 1930s Soviet Union, partly because of the promotion of team and military sports, and partly because of a theory that the game had adverse health effects. In the 1950s, paddles that used a rubber sheet combined with an underlying sponge layer changed the game dramatically, introducing greater spin and speed. These were introduced to Britain by sports goods manufacturer S.W. Hancock Ltd. The use of speed glue beginning in the mid-1980s increased the spin and speed even further, resulting in changes to the equipment to "slow the game down". Table tennis was introduced as an Olympic sport at the Olympics in 1988. Rules and regulations The official rules and regulations are specified in the ITTF handbook, which was first published in 1927. The current (fiftieth) version was published in 2022. Rule changes After the 2000 Olympics in Sydney, the ITTF instituted several rule changes that were aimed at making table tennis more viable as a televised spectator sport. First, the older balls were officially replaced by balls in October 2000. This increased the ball's air resistance and effectively slowed down the game. By that time, players had begun increasing the thickness of the fast sponge layer on their paddles, which made