Badda-Ping! The Whacky World of Olympic Table Tennis

Reed says he took androstenedione, a supplement that converts to a steroid in the body, to help gain weight and had no idea it was banned for Olympic athletes. "I bought it at a health food store," he says. "I didn't go to Mexico and buy something and inject it into my [expletive]."

The event was a mixed blessing for Reed. He was suspended, but he became the most famous Ping-Pong player in America, mocked in a Jay Leno monologue and profiled in Sports Illustrated.

"I can beat most Americans with my shoe," Reed told Sports Illustrated by phone from Taiwan, where he spent his exile in training. "It's not a joke. I've beaten many people with a sandal."

Now, Reed is back, fighting for a spot on the Olympic doubles team and laying his brand of Barney blarney on anybody who'll listen. He brags about Ping-Pong groupies -- "the same as any other kind of groupies," he says -- and he touts the glories of his sport like a carnival barker.

"Table tennis is like martial arts combined with chess," he says. "This is the most exciting sport out there."

Despite Reed's suspension, the worst drug problem in table tennis is not steroids, it's glue.

Before every match, table tennis players strip the padding off their paddles, then glue it back on. This makes the ball bounce off the paddle faster. But the glue is similar to the model airplane cement that some teenagers use to get high. This caused the International Table Tennis Foundation to ban some of the most popular glues, although the ban will not take effect until 2007.

"Most of the people in the U.S. use illegal glues," says Jasna Reed. She points to one of her teammates. "Smell her glue and you die right away," she says, laughing.

Right now, Reed is gluing her own paddle. She takes out a can of glue, spreads the goo on the padding with a brush, then puts it on the naked wooden paddle and presses it down with her forearm. She repeats the process with the other side of the paddle, then takes out scissors and trims off excess rubber.

She does it all very carefully because if her glue isn't right, it plays with her mind. And table tennis is a mind game.

"If my glue isn't the way I want it, I start thinking about it," she says. "And that messes you up totally. You start losing your concentration. You have to be totally focused. This game, it's really in the head."

Of course, it's also in your body. "After two or three days [at a tournament], every single part of my body hurts," she says.

She finishes gluing her paddle. "I have to practice," she says, and she walks out to a table with her partner, Ping.

They begin to volley, rapping the ball back and forth faster and faster, harder and harder, until it sounds like a metronome on amphetamines.

A few minutes later, the match begins and Reed and Ping easily beat two highly ranked local high school stars -- Katherine Wu, 18, from Potomac and Barbara Wei, 15, from Gaithersburg -- in four straight games.

After the match, Reed walks to the sideline, sweating and breathing hard.

"People think you play table tennis in your basement while you're eating a sandwich, but I think it's one of the hardest sports to succeed in," she says. "People compare it to tennis, but it's more like boxing than tennis. Tennis is, like, boring to me. It's not fast enough."