Albury's Steve Dainton is the International Table Tennis Federation CEO

Steve Dainton is the chief executive officer of International Table Tennis Federation, which has an estimated 300 million players.

It's extremely rare for an Australian to lead an international federation and he certainly caught the attention of countryman and International Olympic Committee vice-president John Coates at one function.

"He was wondering how a table tennis guy slipped through the cracks (of Australian sporting officials)," Dainton revealed.

The 43-year-old won the Albury Wodonga Table Tennis division one title four successive times from 1994, before leaving for Melbourne.

He worked with Table Tennis Australia and then moved to Adelaide, before electing to finish his university degree in marketing and business.

He took Chinese as a language option and accompanied a youth team to Beijing around 2000.

After finishing his degree he spent two and a half years as Oceania Table Tennis Federation's development officer and then moved to the ITTF in Shanghai, which has the same population of Australia at around 26 million.

He was the Asian office director from 2005-2011, then the ITTF marketing director in Singapore before landing the sport's top job in August, 2017.

As a teenager dominating in Albury around 25 years ago, Dainton never imagined he would one day run the sport but, like so many successful people in life, seized an opportunity.

"At the moment I love the potential that the sport can be much bigger than what it probably is, especially the commercial side and I'm loving trying to develop and grow that aspect," he explained.

"The sport itself has such speed, when you watch it at the highest level it's amazing, but unfortunately not enough people get to see it here (in Australia).

"As well as the speed of the game, there's also the strategy needed, the sport's been compared to playing chess and doing a 100m sprint at the same time."

The sport has recently started a business entity called World Table Tennis, which Dainton hopes will take the sport's interest to a new level.

"We're trying to innovate the sport into a major global sporting property," he offered.

"We're trying to take some learnings off golf and even darts, which has recently taken off around the world, you find darts on TV all the time and it's more of a show really than the sport itself, people love it and we need to do something similar.

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"We're hoping that we will be seen the way the ATP (tennis) or PGA (golf) is, so in 20 years somebody will say WTT and people know that's the table tennis."

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