If you haven't seen the video of some of the worst Olympic badminton ever played, it's worth 3 minutes of your time. It's startling how blatantly the Chinese and Korean teams are trying to fail — or don't want to exert energy — in their round-robin match in London.
(In all, eight athletes representing three countries took part in the debauchery.)
The crowd rightfully booed them, and they were rightfully disqualified from the Games for such behavior.
But us Americans shouldn't dismiss such an incident as such a bizarre occurrence in a sport that, at a professional level at least, is bizarre to us.
After all, every year we witness intentional losing, in an effort to win later, at the highest levels of our most professional sports. Just not nearly as obvious. And impossible, really, to discipline.
Each spring, at least a handful of NBA teams call it a season and do the following in an unintentional effort to give themselves more lottery balls for the upcoming draft:
1) Sit "injured" players who would undoubtedly be in the lineup if a playoff berth were on the line.
2) Sit their best players to give the "young guys" some run, as if an early April game is really going to determine a player's roster position the next season.
3) Simply not give a crap.
Oh, and let's not forget the teams (err, Boston Celtics) that rest their players throughout a decent portion of the regular season to save them for the playoffs. Intentionally losing? Nope. But decreasing their chance at winning those games? Yep.
Moving to America's most popular sport, what do we say when a team has clinched home-field advantage and sits its entire first string offensive and defensive players in the last week — or even the final two weeks — of the NFL season.
"Resting the starters."
It's a controversial decision in the media and alongside water coolers, but only because we can't agree on whether we like the tactic. The mixed results demonstrate that it's a hit-or-miss type deal.
But fine to do. I, for one, would love to see the Patriots (or whoever; I'm not picking on you, Belichick) "disqualified" from the playoffs for playing a real stinker with QB No. 2 in there Week 17.
Every day, a sports situation comes up where a losing play or a "resting" move is discussed. I applauded those very same Patriots for letting the Giants score a touchdown late in the Super Bowl. It gave them the best chance to win. While I didn't agree with the move, coach Mike Krzyzewski won his fourth national championship after he instructed center Brian Zoubek to intentionally miss a free throw in the 2010 title game against Butler (remember that classic?).
Maybe the most similar "tanking" incident to "BadmintonGate" occurred in my favorite sport of tennis. In 1980, the great Ivan Lendl lost a quickie set to Jimmy Connors so he could gain an easier draw in the round-robin tournament (thankfully, all ATP events are now single-elimination).
Lendl's punishment?
He had to deal with Connors calling him "chicken."
If you have watched the video by now, it's pretty clear that nothing in American sports — at least as far as my mind stretches — comes within 12 badminton courts of being as egregious and ridiculous as that display of giving up was. I don't pretend to know the sport, but even I know that was some awful badminton by the world's best.
So there's no defending the competitors' actions.
However, there's also no supporting a round-robin format that implicitly encourages such a thing. Unless you place teams or individuals in situations where losing has little to no benefits, there will always be, at some level, a small temptation to lose or not try as hard — which, let's be honest, at the highest level of competition is tantamount to throwing up the white flag.
I put this into tennis terms to try to gain some semblance of understanding the players' ludicrous actions. What if, in a round-robin format, Juan Martin del Potro could lose a match and face Andy Murray instead of Rafael Nadal? And let's say this was a year ago, before Murray came ohsoclose to winning his first major?
Not to pick on Murray, but what if Roger Federer could drop a match intentionally —yes, the Greatest of All Time — and play the Scotsman instead of Nadal or Novak Djokovic?
I wouldn't ever anticipate such a happening, and there's no inane format, to my knowledge, that might encourage such an action.
Thankfully, badminton's international rules don't permeate American sports. But we all are aware that nuanced forms of losing or not giving 110 percent are a part of our sports landscape.
Whether we care to admit it or not.
