The scandal engulfing four Olympic badminton teams has abruptly ended the career of one of China’s most promising players.
Yu Yang announced Wednesday she was quitting the sport after the Badminton World Federation disqualified her and her doubles partner, along with three other teams, for “not using one’s best efforts to win a match.”
“This is my last match,” Yu Yang wrote in a microblog to her 1.3 million followers. “Farewell Badminton World Federation; farewell my beloved badminton.”
This is a very interesting question because it raises the question of how/when/if to punish athletes for not giving their “best effort.” In swimming, for example, in the semi-finals, no one is swimming to beat a world or olympic record. They’re swimming just well enough to make the top 8 but, if smart, not a lot better than that, because they would exhaust themselves before the finals. This is a perfectly acceptable strategy.
In the badminton case, they’re trying to place in a certain way to end up playing a certin opponent in the future. The soccer players already said they do this — they will play to a draw where a win would make them play a harder opponent in the next round. This is the strategy of losing now to win later. Since the badminton rules were changed for this Olympics, making it, for the first time, actually good to lose first and win later, it seems to me the officials could have figured out this would be a strategy and they should have made an official statement about it not being legal (if, indeed, it isn’t) before the events began.
That being said, I’ve deliberately lost badminton games playing with kids and it seems to me that if these were the top players in the world, they could have done a better job of looking like they were playing hard. 🙂
#1 I am sorry for the people concerned who were probably acting on instructions, but for the sake of others the decision is probably the right one. It is the same as cricketers who throw games or goalies who miss saves for money or for advantage – it is corrupt and dishonest, unfair to other participants, and not in keeping with the spirit of fair gamesmanship.
Talking of acting on instructions, the ticketing incompetance of the London Organising Committee continues with a level of nuttiness, over-reach and control-freakery which outclasses even the Anglican Communion Office.
Am I being unfair to the ACO? Well – the control-freakery and manipulation continues. Here is but the latest example – guess which very important TEC General Convention decision is not seeing the light of day in the Orwellian ‘Anglican Communion NEWS service’? Dum de dum de dum..
Birds of a feather I am afraid.
Well, I saw this on TV last night and I must say it was really, really bizarre. China was playing Korea and they were *both* trying to lose. This explains why they weren’t able to do it subtley — if the other side is deliberately hitting serves into the net or letting the shuttlecock fall between the two of them as if they didn’t even see it, then, if you want to lose, you have to too. No way to just barely miss the other side’s great shots if they’re refusing to hit any great shots. But the thing is — the audience was booing loudly and the referee came out repeatedly and told them to stop or they would be disciplined. I can only assume that the reason they didn’t stop is because their coaches told them not to. Having had experience in competition in a few sports on at least a middle-level basis (between me, my sister, and our combined 5 kids) I know that you would never make a decision to defy the referees like that without your coach’s approval. What’s even more disgusting is that the Chinese coaches then made one of the players release a groveling “apology” even while her tweets made it clear that she thought she was justified. So the coaches made a bad decision and threw the players under the bus to avoid blame.
Who I really feel sorry for were the ticketholders who thought they were paying to see a top-flight match and ended up watching a joke.