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Eight Olympic badminton players from China, South Korean and Indonesia were caught trying to lose games to gain future competitive advantage. Olympic judges have disqualified the eight Olympic badminton players over the match-throwing scandal.
News sources report that the Badminton World Federation has decided to expel 8 badminton players from the 2010 London Olympics. The eight players involved in the scandal include one Chinese, two South Koreans, and one from Indonesia. The judges are accusing the players of match-fixing by not playing their best game to win matches. This would be the first major scandal of the 2012 Olympic Games.
The Chinese Olympian implicated in the scandal is Yu Yang who is a well-known player in China’s badminton world. Yu Yang and her partner, Wang Xiaoli, won the badminton world championship last year. According to reports, Yu Yang, initially apologized and made promises to reform right after the charges, but then later she announced her plans to retire on a Chinese tweeter-like blog known as Weibo. On the micro blog Yu posted, “This is my last time competing. Goodbye Badminton World Federation, goodbye my beloved badminton, “This is my last time competing. Goodbye Badminton World Federation, goodbye my beloved badminton.”
Reports say there is a lot of finger pointing going on right now between China, South Korea, and Indonesia. Apparently based on those reports the Chinese player standing out as the main suspect in this scandal. According to a report on ndtv.com, China’s badminton coach is taking the responsibility, saying he was to blame.
People from South Korea are expressing anger towards their own players who were involved in the match-fixing scandal. Web-loggers like Shin Hyun-Dong are posting angry notes on local weblogs saying, “It’s a dirty act that goes against sports and the Olympics. They don’t deserve to play sports. Everyone including the coaches should get a 10-year ban.”
If you don’t know what match-throwing is, Wikipedia says “In organised sports, match fixing or sports fixing occurs as a match is played to a completely or partially pre-determined result, violating the rules of the game and often the law. Where the sporting competition in question is a race then the incident is referred to as race fixing. Games that are deliberately lost are sometimes called thrown games. When a team intentionally loses a game, or does not score as high as it can, to obtain a perceived future competitive advantage… Match-fixing generally refers to fixing the final result of the game.”
Olympic Badminton Players Disqualified Over Match-Throwing Scandal