THE INVISIBLE MARGIN

Table tennis is the sport of margins so fine the eye cannot quite see them — the half-millimetre of rubber compression, the millisecond of timing, the spin the layman never catches — and the integrity wrongs in this sport are calibrated to the same scale.

Eleven stories, eleven women at the edges of the table-tennis world: an umpire whose service-toss eye is calibrated to the half-second, a racquet-control inspector who reads what a rubber has been treated with, a coach who has seen a sixteen-year-old's training programme bent toward a federation's medal target, an anti-doping chaperone, a championship results-integrity officer. They notice the one thing that does not belong, and decide that the code must mean what it says.