A shuttlecock kerfuffle in London
Teams ousted for tanking matches
They put the bad in badminton.
Eight women — the reigning world champions from China, two doubles teams from South Korea, and an Indonesian pair — were tossed from the London Olympics on Wednesday for blatantly attempting to lose their matches in order to manipulate the quarter-final draw.
But they really ought to have been expelled for an appalling lack of subtlety.
Tanking games? Happens all the time, in all kinds of sports. And perfectly sensible it is, too, in certain circumstances.
The players, in this case, were probably just following instructions.
But you can’t go around advertising it ... unless, say, you’re Swedish hockey coach Bengt-Ake Gustafsson at the Turin Olympics. But more on that later.
The BBC footage of Tuesday’s badminton matches — in which the crowd is booing, the referee comes on the court to warn the teams to stop being so obvious, and the commentators are expressing disgust at the display of intentional ineptitude — is so damning, there could have been no defence when the women were charged by the Badminton World Federation with “not using one’s best efforts to win a match” and “conducting oneself in a manner that is clearly abusive or detrimental to the sport.”
All the players made such simple errors, serving softly into the net, casually flicking the shuttlecock out of bounds and in every way contributing to what the BBC called a “night of shame” that anything less than disqualification would have been a bigger scandal than their scandalous lack of effort.
The match referee, Torsten Berg of Norway, warned all four teams to cease and desist, and to play seriously — he can be seen gesturing emphatically, exhorting them to try — but his lectures had no effect.
The case was heard Wednesday morning and, in very short order, the Olympics were finished for world champions Wang Xiaoli and Yu Yang of China, and their South Korean opponents, Jung Kyun-eun and Kim Ha-na — both sides were trying to lose that contest — as well as South Korea’s Ha Jung-eun and Kim Min-jung and Indonesia’s Meiliana Jauhari and Greysia Polii, who responded in kind in the next match.
Basically, it was all about the world champs not wanting to finish at the top of their group so they could avoid meeting their No. 2-ranked Chinese compatriots until the final.
The Koreans, who were already through to the next round, had their own reasons for trying to lose, and the second Korean team took up the cause against Indonesia, which then began tanking as well.
The non-action was so flagrant, it was almost funny. But not to the crowd, not to the badminton federation and not to either the London Organizing Committee or the IOC. The phrase “spirit of Olympism” was tossed about a good deal, and it was pointed out by everyone from LOCOG chief Sebastien Coe to former Olympic doubles silver medallist Gail Emms from Great Britain that the minimum requirement of an Olympic competitor is his or her maximum effort.
Otherwise, you know, what’s “higher, faster, stronger” all about?
Critics blame the roundrobin/pool tournament system for the problems that befell the badminton competition here — a single knockout format would eliminate anything less than the old 110 per cent, they say.
Emms, in fact, told The Independent that she knew match-fixing was a distinct possibility as soon as the round-robin format was announced for the Olympic tournament.
“All the managers got together with the referee and said, ‘Look, this has happened, in Group D you will find some very dodgy matches going on in the evening because of it,’ and the referee laughed and said, ‘Oh don’t be silly’,” Emms said.
“And the managers said, ‘We know the game, we know the players and we know the teams and we know this is going to happen.’”
But really, it’s not only a round-robin phenomenon. Who hasn’t suspected sports teams of tanking late regular-season games for any number of reasons: a higher draft pick, an easier schedule the following season, a more desirable playoff opponent?
It’s just the idea of this happening in the Olympics — trying to outsmart the draw system, losing now in order to win later — that has so many people’s shorts in a knot.
Does no one remember the Swedish hockey team in 2006? Gustafsson publicly mooted the idea of dumping their final game of Pool B against Slovakia so they wouldn’t have to face either Canada or the Czech Republic (“One is cholera, the other the plague,” he said) in the quarter-final.
Sweden lost 3-0 to the Slovaks in a game that featured a five-on-three power play during which Peter Forsberg, Mats Sundin, Daniel Alfredsson, Nick Lidstrom and Freddie Modin didn’t even take a shot on goal.
By losing, the Swedes played Switzerland in the quarter-final (while Canada lost to Russia) and went on to win the gold.
There was no Olympic censure from the International Ice Hockey Federation. No one was tossed out. But then, in hockey, if you’re not cheating, you’re not trying.
In badminton, if you’re plainly not trying, that’s cheating.
Bye Bye, Birdie.