Court flooring after the tournament
Equipment
eugene lu Asked 6 months ago
Hi Pingskills, Not sure if you have experience with this but I am generally curious. For table tennis matches, the court floor rubber is usually assembled just for the purpose of the tournament as it initially does not belong there. Just curious. What do they do with the floorings afterwards? Do they just throw it away or reuse it sometimes in the future?
Alois Rosario Answered 6 months ago
Hi Eugene,
The flooring used in table tennis tournaments, often made of specialty rubber or a similar material, is indeed a critical part of setting up a competition-ready arena. Generally, this flooring isn't disposed of after the tournament; instead, it's carefully dismantled, rolled up, and stored for future use. Most organisations and clubs invest in high-quality floor mats and look to maximise their usage due to the cost and the sustainability aspect. These floors are designed to be durable and reusable, often seeing many tournaments before they need replacement. They are very heavy to move when they are rolled up.
The PingSkills shed sourced our flooring from a tournament after they had finished with it. I remember Jeff and I lifting the rolls... we were younger then : )
So, rest assured, there's a lot of reuse and careful management involved in handling court flooring in the table tennis world.
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D K Posted 6 months ago
The table tennis flooring,the taraflex,is an extremely durable flooring made of vinyl,rubber and special foam. It is not easy to dispose.
Therefore they are,as Alois says,stored for future use.
Costs around 60$ / square meter in my area.
Given that the standard size of court for one table is 98 square meters,that is 5880$ for one court. For a torunament with 16 tables that is over 94 000 $.
That is an amount of money which could enable you to live comfortably for 3 years here without needing an income. Just noting.
Therefore,throwing it away would be a giant waste of money.
But taraflex is almost eternal - average taraflex can endure around 10 years of daily play.
I wonder though ALois how big that roll actually was,because I was also a member of the crew preparing taraflex for a tournament,and when we wanted to lift the roll,we needed a transport crane - given that the roll which was roughly 3x30m managed to crush a forklift which should hold max 500kg.
That means the roll had a weight of a small car.
I cannot imagine lifting it by power of only two men.
It required 15 men to lift the roll out of the destroyed forklift before the crane arrived.
So I am shocked :D
Alois Rosario from PingSkills Posted 6 months ago
Believe me we didn't lift that much. The Rolls were about 12 metres long and about 1.5m wide so a lot lighter than that forklift crushing roll you were dealing with. Although Jeff is pretty strong!
D K Posted 6 months ago
That implies that there are different weight categories of the taraflex
Alois Rosario from PingSkills Posted 6 months ago
In this case just different lengths. There are however different thicknesses of the matting.