European Veterans Championships | 29 Jun 2023

Herbert Neubauer: Diplomat, doctor and developer

For many table tennis players, dr. Neubauer is the synonym to tricky pimples out rubbers that we hated to play against when we were young, but so many of us ended up using when we got older. There is more to the story though.

For NEUBAUER attending the European veterans Championships in Sandfjord, Norway bring back good memories. When Norway arranged the World Veterans Championships in the Olympic town of Lillehammer, NEUBAUER won the 50-59 Singles, beating among other world famous Dragutin ŠURBEK. Eight years later he became world champion again, this time in Yokohama and in Singles 60-64 years.

Before all this NEUBAUER got his ph.d. in Economy and he worked as a diplomat for Germany in several countries, such as Switzerland, France, Belgium and Great Britain. Diplomacy is something we know about in table tennis, with the important role our sport has played in several situation, such as apartheid in South Africa, the relation between China and USA and in North- and South-Korea.

After almost two decades in diplomacy,NEUBAUER wanted to spend more time with his big passion, table tennis, and he started his company dr. Neubauer in the early 2000s. To develop table tennis rubbers from scratch is a very time consuming prosess with a lot of testing. NEUBAUER can´t say much about how it is done, because that is a business secret, but there is no question that it takes many hours a day at the table tennis table to figure out how prototypes function in practice.

His company now delivers to 80+ countries around the world, and there are not many table tennis players who don´t know about their products or have either used it or met players who uses it.

In addition to developing table tennis products, were his son is taking an ever more important role in running the company, NEUBAUER has an ambition that European table tennis should catch up with China and Asia. He argues that European coaches have improved a lot recent years and that young European players such as the Lebrun-brothers are taking giant leaps that might even out the Chinese advantage. To start early is important. Children should start playing with a racket from they are two years old, finishes the sympathetic German who lives of and for table tennis.