Olmps

BADMINTON

28 July – 5 AugUST 2012

Wembley Arena

Athletes: 172 | Golds up for grabs: 5

Olympic presence

Badminton was a demonstration sport in 1972 and

1988, and became a full Olympic sport in 1992..

Olympic Format

There are five events: men’s singles and doubles,

women’s singles and doubles, and mixed doubles..

Current Contenders:

China is in a different league from everyone else.

South Korea, Indonesia and Malaysia offer some opposition, while what little European challenge there is comes from Great Britain and Denmark..

Past Champions:

China: 11 | South Korea: 6 | Indonesia: 6

Why Watch Badminton?

In 1876, Englishman Henry Jones set out an early

version of the rules for what he called ‘The Anglo-Indian Game of Badminton’. . He concluded by suggesting that: ‘Any garden that has a small lawn provides the suitable locus .... .given a fair sky and a happy, light-hearted company, Badminton will furnish healthy enjoyable recreation and amusement for both old and young of both sexes for many an afternoon’.. You might think

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him right. . Badminton is a gentle, slow-moving, recreational affair, is it not?

Think again. The shuttlecock may be mere cork and feathers but struck correctly it can split a watermelon in two.. Shuttlecocks have been recorded flying at speeds in excess of 260km an hour – faster than the fastest tennis serves (currently Ivo Karlovic’s 251kmh, followed by Andy Roddick’s 249kmh).. One time and motion study asserted that top-class badminton players cover twice as much ground as tennis players and are engaged in rallies for twice as long.. And the speed and power of badminton is more than matched by its tactical complexity, virtuoso technique and compelling court battles..

In Asia, where people have been playing shuttlecock games for over two thousand years, this sport really matters..When in 1992 badminton stars Susi Susanti and Alan Kusuma returned from the Barcelona Olympics with Indonesia’s first gold medals in any sport, the whole of Jakarta turned out to see the recently engaged couple parade through the city in an open-topped car, to which was fixed a gigantic shuttlecock..At the Athens and Beijing Olympics, the Chinese love of the game gave badminton the biggestTV audiences of any single event and in 2008 the locals packed the badminton arena to see their heroes.. Lin Dan, notionally a lieutenant colonel in the People’s Army, celebrated his victory in the men’ singles by throwing his shoes and racquet into an ecstatic crowd..

So forget the world of genteel English garden parties and take a look at Olympic badminton – 250 million Indonesians and 1..2 billion Chinese can’t be entirely wrong..

The Shuttlecock

The shuttlecock is a remarkably stable device, almost always flying with the cork bottom forward, however it is struck. It is thus capable of great speed, but once the energy of a stroke has been spent the drag imparted by the feathers makes the shuttlecock decelerate very sharply.This makes lobs and lofts and drop-shots possible, strokes that are enhanced by the shuttlecock’s tendency to fall at a steeper angle

than it rises.

Most of us manage with the nylon varieties but these are far too slow and insensitive for competition play. Top-level shuttlecocks are made from sixteen feathers embedded in a rounded cork base covered with leather. Goose feathers are the best. Duck feathers are sometimes used but they have a tendency to dry out and break.The feathers – nearly all from China, where there is a strong taste for goose – must come from the left wing of the bird, and each wing provides only seven or eight feathers of the requisite size.They are easily bent and broken, so players may get through a dozen or more in the course of a match. Shuttlecocks also have to be used quickly: they cannot be vacuum-packed and begin to degrade after a couple of months on the shelf.

The Story of Badminton

There is evidently a special pleasure that humans de-

rive from the arc of an object that appears to float through the air, for there are versions of the shuttlecock all over the world..The Native American Zuni, who lived in what is now New Mexico, played with dried corn husks set with feathers..The pre-Inca Mochi of northern Peru tossed a shuttlecock as part of their fertility rites while in Amazonia people still play Paetec, using a coin-weighted corn husk with feathers attached..

In ancient China Ti Jian Zi was the shuttlecock game, in which players used their feet to keep the sophisticated feathered shuttlecocks aloft.. Crossing the social divides of imperial China, it was played by soldiers, children and ladies of the court alike for almost two millennia, and spread to Thailand,Vietnam, Laos and Malaysia.. In medieval Japan the shuttle (known as the ‘small barbaric demon’) was struck with a bat or hagoita..

Europeans began to play shuttlecock games in the early sixteenth century.. In the royal courts of France and Sweden and in the streets of London, the flight of the shuttle had the same cross-class and cross-gender appeal it had in Asia.. In England the game was known as battledore and shuttlecock, and was played with racquets covered

in vellum.. It was a fashionable pastime at the court of James I, but was also played by children in the streets, who would sing nursery rhymes and counting games as they kept the shuttle aloft.. It became popular in France, too, where as a rare example of a game played by both sexes, it was seen as full of erotic potential.. Count Rivarol, enjoying the game in Versailles, wrote with some relish, ‘How I’d like to be a shuttlecock to be able to stroke uncovered generous breasts and come to rest at the foot of young beauties..’

Despite their love of shuttlecock games none of these civilisations moved beyond forms of competitive keepy-uppy, transfixed by the deceleration and fall of the shuttlecock, and almost oblivious to the possibilities of speed, power and confrontation..All this changed in the mid-nineteenth century, when British army officers and imperial officials discovered the many variants of the game that were played in Madras, Bombay, Calcutta and Peshawar..Though their rules varied greatly, the Anglo-Indian hybrids that emerged all included court markings, a high net, oppositional playing and a system of scoring..

It appears that these versions were first tentatively combined at a weekend party in the 1860s at Badminton House, home of the Duke of Beaufort..The association between this country house and the game became fixed in 1873, when an extensive correspondence began in the sporting journal The Field over the precise rules of the ‘Badminton game of battledore’.. In response a Major Forbes submitted a pamphlet published in Calcutta by the Great Eastern Hotel Company that decreed an hourglass-shaped court and allowed up to three a side..Two years later in 1875 the first badminton club was opened in Folkestone, Kent. . Similar clubs sprung up in other English seaside resorts and in towns where the officers of the British Raj chose to retire, and just over a decade later the Badminton Association was established in Southsea and the game’s rules were codified and published..

By the eve of the First World War badminton had found new blood in the rest of the British Isles, northern France and Denmark.. In the inter-war years the sport made its way down the social scale to the British lower middle classes, and travelled back out to India and Malaysia, where the game was played by the last generation of

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Badminton on Ice: Hugh Forgie

Badminton became big enough in the USA in the 1930s to sustain a small number of professionals who made a living playing exhibition games. Most famous of them was Hugh Forgie,who abandoned professional ice hockey for the new craze.‘I did for badminton what the Harlem Globetrotters did for basketball,’ he recalled, and for a time he even worked as the

Globetrotters’ half-time show. He began touring in 1935, chal-

lenging all comers, before teaming up with British trick-shot artist Ken

Davidson in a show so spellbinding that they sold out a 38-week run

at the London Palladium, where the audience included King George and Queen Elizabeth.Forgie went on to star in two badminton movies – Flying Feathers and Volley Oops! – but after the war the public tired of comedy badminton and he was forced to up the ante, putting his act on ice. In his travelling revue show of the early 1950s, Ice Capades, Forgie would play extraordinary rallies on skates,culminating in a frenzied one-man game in which he would serve and receive,skidding back and forth around the net.

Game On: Badminton Basics

The game begins with a serve. Serves must be made

from below the waist, with the racquet head below the hand and with both feet on the ground.. Serves that are not touched by the receiver must land in the service area to win the point.. If they touch the net, and land in, a let is called and the point replayed..

Rallies

Rallies are won when the shuttle touches the floor

of a demaracted area on the opponent’s side of the court or if it goes out of play.. Shuttles that land on the line are considered in play.. Shuttles that clip the net but go over it are considered legal.. Whoever wins the rally gets the next serve; points are won whether one is serving or receiving (a change from original practice)..

Games and matches

Games are won by the first player to reach 21 points.

If the score is tied at 20-all the game continues until someone is two points clear.. If the game reaches 29-all, then the next point decides the game..

Matches are the best of three games..

The Finer Points

The Serve is Not King

Unlike tennis, service does not give an overwhelming

advantage nor does it produce the fastest strokes.. Players tend to opt for serves that that go low over the net, and use flicks and spin to deceive the receiver..

Making Space for the Smash

In singles, players spend much of their time trying to

manoeuvre their opponents around the court, hoping to open up space for a decisive winning shot – an unplayable smash, perhaps, or a lethal drop shot..

Forcing the Lob

In doubles, where there is less space on the court,

players try to force their opponents into making high lobs, thereby setting up smashing opportunities for themselves..They do this by playing drop shots close to the net..

Forcing Errors

The top players are so good that space rarely opens

up and return lobs are brilliantly placed..Therefore, most points are won on mistakes, where a return is put into the net or out of play..

The Importance of Deception

Given how hard it is to hit a winner, there is a pre-

mium on deceiving your opponent, gaining an advantage by disguising your shot or changing it at the last moment. .A splitsecond shift of the angle of the racquet head produces a slice, dropping the shuttlecock short, a result that can also be achieved by abruptly shortening the hitting action.. The best players can also get a certain amount of spin on to their shots and will sometimes produce a double motion shot, in which the stroke begins in one direction before the player suddenly snaps into a different one..

Badminton Goes to the Olympics

In 1934 a tiny International Badminton Federation

was set up in Southsea but with just nine members its global reach was limited.. In fact, it took badminton until 1972 to gain a place as a demonstration sport and another twenty years to achieve full Olympic status..What changed its standing was the rise of the game in Asia, which has made possible a small but sustainable world professional circuit..The shuttlecock game has gone home..

The balance of badminton power began tilting eastward in the 1960s.. In post-independence Malaysia and Indonesia, badminton acquired huge public status..The game had arrived in Indonesia in the 1920s via the gyms and games halls of the Chinese communities of Singapore and Malaya.. By the 1930s rival clubs were competing in Jakarta and the game had spread across all of Java..While Chinese participation was high, the game served as a rare arena in which Chinese, Javanese and other ethic groups could socialise, and from which the colonial Dutch elites were absent.. Indeed, given the long folk memory of Asian shuttlecock games, badminton did not appear to be a foreign sport at all.. In the years after independence this culture nurtured world class players like Rudi Hartono, who was among Indonesia’s few global sports stars..

In the 1970s the game became popular in South Korea.. As with the American craze of the 1930s,under conditions of rapid urbanisation and rising affluence the lower middle classes, who were excluded from golf and tennis clubs, opted for badminton.. China had its badminton boom in the 1980s and 1990s..The government sports system relentlessly focused on nurturing champions, making the sport even more popular..

The rising power of Asian badminton was heralded by the creation of the breakaway World Badminton Federation in 1978.. In a direct challenge to the control exercised over world badminton by the four British national associations, the WBF called for the expulsion of Taiwan as a precondition of Chinese membership, the expulsion of apartheid South Africa and the introduction of one nation one vote decision-making..They then established the Independent World Championships and called for a boycott of the

All-England tournament..Three years later the IBF gave in to the inevitable, and signed a union with the WBF on the latter’s terms..

Now a truly global game, with the weight of Asian numbers behind it, badminton was introduced at the Seoul Olympics and took its permanent place at the Games in 1992.. South Korea and Indonesia shared the gold medals that year and in 1996 the Dane Poul-Erik Høyer Larsen won Europe’s only badminton gold in the men’s singles.. Nearly everything else has been won by the Chinese, who have received nearly half of all the medals awarded at the Olympics for badminton, including eleven golds..This is the new world order: expect more of the same..