Sabine Winter amazed the table tennis world with a change in the game and brought about a change that no one expected. She has now long since arrived at the absolute top of the world.
“I hadn’t even dared to dream the last few weeks and months” – this is how national table tennis player Sabine Winter, who trains in Bad Aibling and Düsseldorf, describes her current high. That brought her to the absolute top of the world. At the upcoming Table Tennis Team World Championships in London, she is nominally Germany’s top player at a world championship for the first time.
Virtually retired before the 2024 Olympics
Around two years ago, shortly before the 2024 Olympics, everything was different: Winter was a good player at a high level, but not at the highest level, and was therefore missing from the German squad for the Olympics in Paris – a bitter setback for the then 31-year-old.
“I didn’t have much fun with table tennis back then. I was good, but somehow I had the feeling that I wasn’t making any progress at my level,” Winter revealed in the Sportschau interview: “I think others had also lost faith in me a bit,”
Game system changed two years ago
So Winter decided to do something that had never happened before at a top level and at the age of over 30: she changed her entire playing system. From then on, she switched to a passive, so-called “anti” racket rubber on her backhand.
This means that she was primarily able to disrupt the opponent’s game. While the ball normally jumps away from the racket, Winter’s new rubber basically “absorbs” any rotation of the ball.
Winter: “Not desperate, but curious”
The idea had already come to her a year earlier: “I noticed that some top players had problems with this. I then watched a lot of these games and thought, if I could learn this, it would be a great fit for my strengths.”
She wasn’t “desperate”, but rather “curious”. With the new game system, Winter is more versatile – in addition to the new ones, she hasn’t forgotten her old strokes. It is not uncommon for Winter to turn his racket completely unexpectedly during a rally and suddenly act offensively again.
National coach Boros: “Winter’s development is a small miracle”
“I can always adapt the game, I have more strokes available than before,” she explained. Women’s national coach Tamara Boros also sees advantages: “With the new game system, you as an opponent are under pressure all the time to play well and at a good pace. Then you make more mistakes.”
According to Boros, the fact that the changeover is working so well is “a small miracle”. Winter’s goal is clear: to use her great strength, the forehand. “Nobody in women’s table tennis plays as good a forehand as Sabine,” praised the national coach.
Externally, skepticism about the change prevailed
Boros, like many others, was initially skeptical about the system change: “I honestly didn’t believe it could fit so well. We then talked and said, we’ll give you time for the first six months and then we’ll see if it works.”
During these months, Winter had to prove that she could do it – the main work did not take place in the Düsseldorf performance center, but in her home town of Bad Aibling. “My coach there, Thomas Wetzel, and the training group carried it all through with me. I wouldn’t have been able to do it without them,” said Winter.
Last year, world leadership suddenly expanded
The 33-year-old gradually worked her way back to the appropriate level: “You have to stay diligent and be prepared not to doubt again if something doesn’t work.” How well she mastered all of this in an astonishingly short time can be seen from her tournament results and her development in the world rankings.
She made her first exclamation mark in November 2025 when she amazed the table tennis world. She beat players from the world’s best several times, only in the final of the tournament in Montpellier did she narrowly lose 3:4 sets against the third-seeded Chinese Wang Yidi.
This year more successful than ever
Sabine Winter with her new red racket rubber
Winter is currently experiencing the most successful year of her career: she is the only European in the top 15 in the world. In 2026 she reached the final of the Singapore Smash, one of the big “Grand Slam” tournaments in table tennis – as the first German ever since these tournaments were introduced.
She recently won bronze at the World Cup in Macao. She also took revenge on Wang Yidi for the narrow defeat in Montpellier – Winter clearly won 4-0 in the quarter-finals. Only with the current world champion Sun Yingsha was the final stop in the semi-finals.
Winter: “I’m sure I can get better”
Nobody knows where Winter can go from here – not even she herself: “I’m sure that I can still improve my own game. But I’m also sure that my opponents will analyze me more and train against such a game system.”
Meanwhile, Boros speaks of Winter’s changeover as “the best decision of her career” and confirms: “I still see a lot of potential for improvement with this game system.” Winter would like to implement the even higher level for the first time at the Team World Championships in London. There can hardly be a better time for this.
Our sources:
- Sports show filming with Sabine Winter
- Sportschau interview with Tamara Boros
- Results page of the World Table Tennis Federation (ITTF)
- ITTF world rankings
Broadcast: WDR.de “Sabine Winter in top form before the Table Tennis World Championships”, 04/27/26 6:10 p.m
