From banned speed glue to the modern boost
The history of treating rubbers begins not with today's oils but with a tin of glue and an accidental discovery. In the late 1970s several players noticed that a rubber freshly glued with solvent-based contact adhesive played differently for the first few hours: faster, more elastic, with a catapult effect — described in 2.4 — that engaged with less effort. The volatile organic compounds (VOCs) in the glue penetrated the sponge, swelled it temporarily and altered its mechanical response. Once the solvent evaporated, the sponge returned to its original state.
What began as a curiosity became a technique. Through the 1980s, speed glue went from being the resort of a few to a widespread practice in international competition. Players peeled their rubbers off before every match, applied one or several coats of fresh glue and waited for the solvents to do their work before reassembling the bat. The ritual was visible, noisy — the smell of solvent pervaded the warm-up halls — and perfectly legal. For two decades, competing at the highest level without speed glue meant playing at a measurable disadvantage.
The problem arrived by two routes. The first was medical: VOCs are toxic when inhaled over long periods, and players were breathing them in enclosed spaces before every match, sometimes several times a day in a long tournament. The second was institutional: table tennis's entry into the Olympic programme had raised pressure from the International Olympic Committee on federations to remove potentially harmful substances from the sporting environment. Both routes converged in the same direction.
In September 2008 the ITTF (International Table Tennis Federation) banned the use of adhesives containing volatile organic compounds. The rule was categorical: any substance containing VOCs was prohibited, not only in competition but in equipment presented for inspection. Portable detectors capable of measuring the presence of solvents on the surface of a rubber were introduced, and the rules moved from tacit tolerance to active policing — a change whose practical implications are set out in 14.4.
Industry responded quickly, but along different paths according to tradition. European and Japanese manufacturers accelerated the development of tensor rubbers — described in 5.2 — which build in at the factory an internal elasticity equivalent, to some degree, to what speed glue provided temporarily. Butterfly's Tenergy 05, launched in 2008, was no coincidence of timing: it was the industrial answer to a market losing its favourite tool of adjustment.
The Chinese tradition took another path. Rubbers with a tacky topsheet and a hard sponge — the family described in 5.3 — could not solve their problem with factory tension, because their design starts from different premises. What they needed was not a new rubber but a treatment compatible with the rules to replace speed glue without its VOCs. That is how modern tuning oils came about, formulated to swell the sponge without leaving detectable volatile residues. Boosting today is, in essence, the functional heir of speed glue: it pursues the same effect — a softer, more elastic, more reactive sponge — by a different chemical route.
That historical fork explains much of the tension surrounding the subject. For the European tradition, a boost is a relic of an era left behind; for the Chinese one, it is the logical continuation of a practice that never stopped making technical sense. The cultural implications of that divergence are taken up in 14.5. What matters here is that modern boosting did not spring from nowhere: it has a lineage of almost half a century, a prohibition that transformed it without eliminating it, and an industrial logic that keeps it current.