Nobody ever came to my chair because their shoes were broken. They came because their shoes were tired, and there is a difference. A grip is the same: it does not fail, it just quietly stops doing its job and you blame your backhand.
The Volkl Biotac is a replacement grip, not an overgrip — that is the important distinction. It goes on the bare handle in place of the original factory grip, and it is thicker, tackier and considerably more comfortable than what most frames ship with.
At roughly 1.8 mm of polyurethane with an adhesive backing, it builds a slightly larger, softer handle and gives a genuinely tacky surface to hold, which suits players who dislike the thin, hard feel of a stock grip or who want a fractionally bigger handle without buying a new racquet.
Fitted properly, it is also the cheapest transformation available in tennis: same frame, same strings, completely different racquet in the hand. Peel the backing, start at the butt cap, overlap by about a third, keep steady tension, and finish with the tape.
One wrap will see you everywhere from a raw March morning in the Teutoburg Forest to an August evening under lights, and by the way, it is also perfect for the long climb up the Grotenburg to the monument, where the handrail is cold and your hand is the only thing you brought.
Detmold has one of Europe's great monuments to persistence. The Hermannsdenkmal, on the Grotenburg hill above the town, commemorates Arminius, the Cheruscan chieftain who destroyed three Roman legions under Varus in AD 9 — and the sculptor Ernst von Bandel spent most of his life getting it finished.
Below, the Fürstliches Residenzschloss was the seat of the counts and later princes of Lippe, one of the small sovereign states that survived inside the German Empire until 1918. The LWL open-air museum, opened in 1971, spreads over some ninety hectares with more than a hundred historic buildings — the largest in Germany.
And the Externsteine are sandstone pillars in the Teutoburg Forest that medieval hermits carved into.
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