Eight Badminton Players Kicked Out Of The Olympics For Throwing Matches (Watch Video)

Eight women's doubles badminton players from China, South Korea, and Indonesia were disqualified today after throwing matches in order to manipulate future match-ups. After the four women's pairs had qualified for the quarterfinals of the tournament, they began intentionally losing games in order to dictate a more favorable match-up in the next round.

The disqualified players included the world champions from China — Wang Xiaoli and Yu Yang, as well as the bronze-medal favorites Ha Jung-eun and Kim Min Jung of South Korea.

Basically, they wanted to avoid playing the 2nd best team in the world in the quarterfinals.

In Olympic badminton, there is a preliminary stage followed by a knockout stage. In the prelim stage, the teams are divided into four, four-team groups and play a round-robin. The top two teams from each group advance to an eight-team, bracket-style knockout tournament. In that knockout tournament, the team that came in 1st in Group A plays the team that came in 2nd in Group B, and so on.

The reason the pairs started losing games in the first place was that the second-best team in the world (Tian Qing & Zhao Yunlei of China) were upset in their group stage and came in 2nd instead of 1st. As a result, Wang/Yu and Ha/Kim tried to lose on purpose so they wouldn't win their group and have to play Tian/Zhao in the next round.

I'm not going to pass judgement on these competitors because it seems like the rules actually encouraged this sort of thing.

But this incident reminds me of a great story I heard from some years ago involving two cross-country skiiers from Norway. I may have the names wrong, but I think one of them was the legendary skiier Bjorn Daehlie, who was competing in either 1994 or 1998 for what would have been a record number of career gold medals in cross-country events.

The story, as I remember it, was told by Thomas Alsgaard, who was about five years younger than Daehlie and was competing against him in the race. Daehlie was a national hero in Norway, and Alsgaard was in the lead late in the race. He didn't want to win the race and actually slowed down to let Daehlie catch up, until he heard Daehlie scolding him from several yards behind. The story as I remember it was that Daehlie told him that if he (Daehlie) won the race, he'd wait at the finish line for Alsgaard and then kick his @ss for settling for second place.

This is the kind of thing that legends are made of. Alsgaard won the gold medal, Daehlie got the silver, and they're both champions no matter how you look at it.

It’s a racket.

For years now, there have been rumors of mob influence in fixing badminton games in this country. Yes, the mob has made millions from drugs, prostitution, and loan sharking, but badminton is where the real money is.

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