The Olympic table tennis championship is held every four years. There were four events at first: men's singles, women's singles, men's doubles and women's doubles.
The total number of people in the Olympic Games is limited. Since the IOC's policy at that time was to reduce the number of team events and people as much as possible, ITTF had just joined the Olympic Games and had to accept this restriction. Moreover, at that time, the International Olympic Committee was not interested in the team events of individual events, so the first agreement reached between ITTF and the Olympic Committee was that only 64 male athletes and 32 female athletes could participate in the men's and women's singles competitions of the Olympic Games. After that, we discussed with the head of the Olympic Committee and added men's and women's doubles. At that time, the quota of the International Olympic Committee for table tennis players was 192. Finally, the number of table tennis players who entered the 1988 Seoul Olympic Games was: 64 pairs of men's singles, 48 pairs of women's singles, 32 pairs of men's doubles and 0/6 pairs of women's doubles.
In several Olympic Games, many athletes participated in singles and doubles events, which made the number of athletes fail to meet the Olympic quota, leading to the reduction of the staff of the International Olympic Committee. The current limit is 172. Since the Sydney Olympic Games in 2000, ITTF has increased the number of doubles without affecting the number of singles, reaching the Olympic quota of 172.
ITTF has always taken various measures to increase the number of table tennis events and the number of participants in the Olympic Games. However, due to the influence of the International Olympic Committee's "Olympic slimming" plan, this wish cannot be realized for the time being. In addition, ITTF doesn't want players from one country to face each other in the Olympic finals (1 1 events in the five finals of 20 events are played by players from the same country). Therefore, during the Athens Olympic Games, ITTF officials had extensive exchanges with all parties. In order to increase the excitement of the competition, ITTF proposed to replace doubles with teams, but the International Olympic Committee only made a request that the number of participants should not be increased in strict accordance with President Rogge's "Olympic slimming" plan, otherwise the proposal would not be passed. Therefore, ITTF has formulated the plan of "Team Entering the Olympics" and put forward various competition modes, hoping that 12 ~ 16 teams can participate.
During the 2004 Athens Olympic Games, ITTF President shalala announced that he had met with IOC President jacques rogge and the executive committees, and everyone agreed to replace the doubles competition with the team competition in the 2008 Olympic Games without increasing the number of participants. This proposal was adopted at the IOC meeting held in Singapore on October 27th, 2005/KLOC-0.