"Summer, do your worst! Light your tinsel moon, and call on your performing stars to fall on headlong through your paper sky..." So wrote Dorothy Parker in her poem, "August." Now, Thomas Weikert (pictured) and the rest of the International Table Tennis (ITTF) executive committee have issued a similarly bold apostrophic challenge to the month: the suits have announced their intentions to resume international table tennis competition three months hence. A little context may be of use. On March 29, in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the ITTF postponed all travel-related activities through June. Yesterday, they again moved the target restart until August, at minimum. Normally, in years evenly divisible by four, August would see the best of the best in peak form, battling for the most elusive of prizes in table tennis: an Olympic gold medal. Life under the eerie umbrella of "the new normal," however, is anything but normal. This year, players will be lucky if they can even begin shaking of the rust at their first international tournaments in half a year. They will then have one year to resume training for the Tokyo Olympiad, postponed until August 2021. Of course, the August 2020 forecast is not set in stone. Things may change again, given the inevitability of unpredictable developments. Nevertheless, whenever the performing stars of international table tennis finally get back to work, it will certainly be an august occasion.

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