Today, eight players on four women's badminton doubles teams were expelled from the Games for "match fixing." Basically, badminton players suffer from the same extensive depth of field that spelled doom for Jordyn Wieber: The best teams generally come from Central and Southeast Asia, so their biggest competition is usually their fellow countrymen. In the tournament's round-robin knockout format, teams from China, South Korea, and Indonesia were facing the distinct possibility of having to go up against, and knock out, teams from their own countries before the finals. They obviously didn't want this to happen.
The first round of group play was non-elimination, just to determine the draw for the knockout quarterfinals. So in last night's final Round of sixteen matches, Chinese World Champions Wang Xiaoli and Yu Yang deliberately started hitting shots wide or serving into the net against South Koreans Jung Kyung-eun and Kim Ha-na. Both pairs had already qualified to move on to the next round; the throwing of the game seemed to be in order to ensure China's No. 1 team wouldn't meet China's No. 2 team of Tian Qing and Zhao Yunlei until the gold medal round. The South Koreans said they only started throwing the game because the Chinese started it. The Chinese said they'd just been trying to conserve their energy since they'd already qualified. The Korean team won handily, even though the longest rally was a laughable four strokes. Among the best players in the world. (Apparently the Chinese are the best at throwing matches, too.) The referee came down at some point to admonish them for not trying hard enough. The crowd booed them off the court. (via)
BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!
2 comments:
this is a flawed system. the players are only taking advantage of the stupidity of the set up.
agreed. i read somewhere that there is a "code of conduct" that requires them to give their all (for tennessee today). i guess they broke that.
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