- Badminton authorities have rejected South Korea's appeal of its disqualification from the Olympic women's doubles competition, and Indonesia has withdrawn its challenge.
Four doubles teams were disqualified Wednesday from the London Games after trying to lose matches to receive a more favorable place in the tournament.
The Badminton World Federation punished the eight players after investigating two teams from South Korea and one each from China and Indonesia. South Korea and Indonesia appealed, but China accepted the decision.
Why hate on the players when the tournament is setup in such a way that encourages such behavior? The ultimate goal is to win the gold and that is what these teams are trying to set themselves up for.
If they don't like the effect, it has to be solved at the system level or it will continue to manifest. If not, the result will be: 1) Players attempting to throw matches with more subtlety. 2) Officials disqualifying or sanctioning players based on misinterpretations of vague, non-verifiable player intent. Neither of these situations is ideal. It's a simple problem to solve too, -they just need to do it.
On the other hand, THIS IS THE FREAKIN' OLYMPICS - to win gold you need to train hard, compete hard, be mentally and physically at your best and strategize the fuck out of the competition in order to get that medal. The swimmers do it with pacing every race. Or this - Japan would have won its four-team group with a victory. But a draw put it in second, just enough to qualify for the knockout stage. Japan’s coach says he did it to ensure the team didn’t travel across the United Kingdom. Second place meant it would start the knockout round in Cardiff, Wales, where the squad already was. The winner of Group F, in contrast, will play its first knockout game in Scotland. However, you also need to keep in mind that they really tried to outlose themselves. I read somewhere that they were playing so obviously horribly that the entire crowd was booing, the longest rally was only 4 passes, and they were just hitting the ball into the net. I think that is where the problem comes in. Swimmers still work their tight little asses off and it is intense. It is competitive. It is worthy of the Olympics. This was obviously not.The coach of Japan women’s Olympic soccer team acknowledged that it intentionally avoided scoring in its third and final group game, a 0-0 draw with winless South Africa on Wednesday, according to The Independent.
-from here
The IOC is nothing more than a bunch of corrupt hypocrites.
There was nothing wrong with the way the tournament was set up. They only wanted players who had traveled far, at great expense, to be able to play more games than a single elimination tournament would have allowed. The fault is entirely with the players and coaches who tried to pervert the system and created lousy matches because of their behavior. I'm surprised they were only disqualified. The Badminton Federation should have barred them from any future tournaments as well. They know that these players care so little for the game that they'll wreck it trying to get bragging rights. No matter how any future tournament is set up, these players will attempt to do the same again, and they will succeed to some extent or other because there is no such thing as a perfect system. Any system requires the people in it to act in good faith, and these people couldn't be bothered with doing even that.
If the game is all about sportsmanship and fair play, this girl would have been in the medal rounds. The USA Men's Basketball team would have won the gold medal in Munich in 1972.
A real problem is that these players could have thrown the match while looking like they were trying, and IMO that wouldn't have been any better. How would you ever know that a team wasn't underplaying? In that sense, there is a problem with the setup. An easy solution would be to have a limit of only one team per country.
The group play format is pretty common in esports tournaments, and I have always thought it was a horrible model precisely because it encourages this kind of behavior. I was shocked to find that the Olympics uses this format.