Badminton’s Irish great Scott
QUESTION Who is the greatest ever Irish badminton player? THE greatest ever badminton player produced in Ireland has been Scott Evans, who recently announced his retirement from the sport after 14 years, having scaled its international competitive heights.
Scott was born in Dundrum, south Dublin, and he started playing badminton before he reached his fifth birthday.
Any time that he and his older brother, Lee, saw a free court at the badminton complex on Whitehall Road in north Dublin, where their father Martyn still runs a leading racquet store, they grabbed the opportunity to practise their smashes across the net.
The young lad relished playing in such an individual sport and very soon, Scott starting bringing home the medals. He progressed through the junior ranks of badminton very swiftly, so much so that by the time he was 14, he had claimed a slew of prestigious under-19 titles in Leinster.
Then came the big roadblock to developing his career further in Ireland. At the age of 16, his one burning ambition was to become a champion badminton player, but he found that the coaching resources simply didn’t exist here.
So he left Wesley College in Dublin and quit Ireland to live in Copenhagen. Scott was drawn to Denmark because, he says, it’s the best country in Europe in which to play badminton and it’s one of the top eight badminton countries in the world.
He settled down in Copenhagen and nearly all his time there was spent with one club, Gentofte. He found all the back-up he needed and he soon settled into serious winning form. He won the Irish national championships in 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011 and 2012.
He also played in three Olympic Games: in Beijing in 2008, in London in 2012 and in Rio de Janeiro in 2016.
At the Rio Games, he became the first Irishman to win an Olympic badminton match, when he beat the highly regarded German player, Marc Zwiebler, in the last set.
Eventually, Scott soared so high that he was ranked the 23rd best badminton player in the world, a placing no other Irish player has come close to matching. Copenha- gen had one another attraction, his girlfriend Camilla Hosbjerg, who founded a Danish clothing retailer, Hosbjerg.
He revealed some years ago that he was getting substantial financial support from organisations here in Ireland. Sport Ireland was giving him €12,000 a year, while Badminton Ireland was paying him €6,000 a year for tournaments. He was also getting sponsorships, including one from Hegarty Financial Management.
But despite all this financial assistance, Scott still wasn’t getting enough funding to make his participation in international events viable.
In the last few years, he used up a lot of his own funds to finance his participation in big badminton events in places such as Australia, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia and Singapore.
In his career, Scott has had around 230 wins, and around 204 losses. In 2015, he achieved his highest ever world ranking, 23rd, whereas by March, 2017, he had dropped to 109th place.
There’s also younger competition coming up. In 2005, Nhat Nguyen came from his native Vietnam to live in Dublin, and in 2016 he became European under-17 badminton champion.
For Scott, the inevitable had to happen. In February of this year, at the age of 30, he called time on his international badminton career, thanking everyone, including his family, for all the support they had given him throughout his star-studded career. He also announced that he was to start work on an as-yet-unnamed new collaborative project.
But despite retiring from the sport, Scott Evans hangs on to his title of being Ireland’s greatest ever badminton player.
Irene O’Hanrahan, Co. Limerick. QUESTION What defines an empire? Does it have to be a certain size? What is the smallest entity defined as an empire? IN TERMS of scale, empire does not have a specific definition. The US international relations expert Michael Doyle describes an empire as ‘a relationship, formal or informal, in which one state controls the effective political sovereignty of another political society’.
Early empires were smaller than later ones, as advances in technology enabled the ruling of larger swathes of land. The empires of the Levant and the Fertile Crescent were tiny.
Other early Middle Eastern empires include the Hittites, Akkadians, Babylonians, Assyrians, Jebusites and Nabateans.
One particularly small empire was the Empire of Trebizond (now Trabzon in Turkey), which held power from 1204 to 1461.
This was a narrow strip of land composed of the south-eastern Black Sea coast, a portion of the Pontic Alps and the southern part of the Crimean Peninsula, which in total was about one-quarter of the size of Ireland.
It is considered to be an empire because it gained great wealth from the taxes it levied on the goods traded between Persia and Europe via the Black Sea, and was home to diverse groups of people including Georgians, Greeks, Armenians and Venetians.
In contrast, at its peak, the British Empire of the Twenties covered more than 33million square kilometres (24% of the Earth’s area) and included territories in every continent.
Charles Gray, Stourbridge, W. Midlands O IS THERE a question to which you have always wanted to know the answer? Or do you know the answer to a question raised here? Send your questions and answers to: Charles Legge, Answers To Correspondents, Irish Daily Mail, Embassy House, Herbert Park Lane, Ballsbridge, Dublin 4. You can also fax them to 0044 1952 510906 or you can email them to charles.legge@dailymail.ie. A selection will be published but we are not able to enter into individual correspondence.