Olympic Badminton Players Blowing the Whistle on Widely Used but Flawed Competition System — Media Ignore It!

Eight Olympic bad­minton play­ers were dis­qual­i­fied because they clearly tried to lose a match against each other in the early rounds which would give them eas­ier oppo­nents in later rounds. I think this sounds like a smart strat­egy and this surely is not a new one. New is how­ever, that they got dis­qual­i­fied and that they did not even pre­tend to play prop­erly.
We are told that many fans  are upset about the lack of sports­man­ship and some play­ers are very apolo­getic to their fans.

What is really news­wor­thy is, that the media did not address the actual prob­lem — one of global con­se­quences -  at all.

If at all, they dis­cuss how it can be proven that some­one tries to lose on pur­pose — which is an inter­est­ing sub­ject but not the big issue at all. It even makes the Fox News com­men­ta­tor appear as if she cared about jus­tice here. And she may even gen­uinely care. How­ever, the injus­tice on a much higher level is ignored as usual.

It is obvi­ous why main­stream (corporate/government spon­sored) media would not debate big issues like alter­na­tive eco­nomic sys­tems or the flaws in the cur­rent finan­cial sys­tem. The media are doing well with it, why should they bite the hands that feed them (share­hold­ers, adver­tis­ers, politi­cians, banks)?

The same or very sim­i­lar com­pe­ti­tion sys­tem is widely used in the most pop­u­lar sports tour­na­ments on this planet, includ­ing bas­ket­ball, soc­cer, Amer­i­can foot­ball, ten­nis — you name it.

So why are the media not address­ing the real issue when such a great oppor­tu­nity presents itself  (unlike Indonesia's head of bad­minton in this short video)?

The real issue is that this widely used com­pe­ti­tion group sys­tem, one that is opti­mized to pro­vide the most enter­tain­ing match ups, is severely flawed and should be replaced with proven fairer — but less enter­tain­ing — sys­tems.
The media would not want or could not afford it. So why would they address it?

I watched the sur­pris­ingly hard to find footage of one of these games. It appears the play­ers did not like this strat­egy of inten­tional los­ing — and why should they? Espe­cially when two teams meet who both have been told by their trainer to lose by all means. The play­ers love their sport, they love action and the sup­port of their fans. I think I can see in their body lan­guage that they were not com­fort­able at all. It was not what they wanted even though it was increas­ing their chances to win.

I believe pro­fes­sional sport has finally become com­pletely hijacked by money and greed like much of sci­ence, pol­i­tics, edu­ca­tion and more. Sport is no longer about the ego, skills, effort and life of the athlete.

Today, thanks to our holy growth (and debt) based global econ­omy and the result­ing need for ever-increasing com­pe­ti­tion, there are many other stake­hold­ers involved. These stake­hold­ers are not only highly paid coaches and spon­sors, share­hold­ers (own­ers of teams) but also cor­po­rate media (they want enter­tain­ment above every­thing) them­selves as well as polit­i­cal agendas.

With few excep­tions, the play­ers (and even their coaches) appear almost like money pro­duc­ing tools or toys for those stake hold­ers to play with. They can be bought and exchanged, up and down­graded like soft­ware rac­ing cars.

I admire the bad­minton play­ers for their inabil­ity to go ahead and lie and pre­tend (like many oth­ers) even after the umpire warned both teams could be dis­qual­i­fied. In my eyes the play­ers were the ones who blew the whis­tle on an issue that should have been dis­cussed and solved many years ago in most sports.

Both the media and com­plain­ing fans should have sup­ported or awarded them and not pooh-pooh them while pro­tect­ing their own short-sighted inter­ests (per­sonal mon­e­tary loss) and pre­tend­ing that the Olympic ideals have much mean­ing (or room) in the cur­rent but long expired eco­nomic paradigm.

As long as most of the pop­u­la­tion make cor­po­rate media the main­stream media by watch­ing, uncrit­i­cally believ­ing and sup­port­ing them, I do not expect any attempts to improve on or even dis­cuss the urgently needed big — par­a­digm chang­ing — issues on a mean­ing­ful scale.

key­words: flawed com­pe­ti­tion sys­tem, bad­minton, Olympics 2012, London