Lowlights from the Olympics badminton scandal

[Don]

http://www.nbcolympics.com/news-blogs/b ... tches.html

And I thought people cheat in sports manga. Compared to this, trying to kill your opponent to win a game of tennis looks like totally legitmate.

[Flip]

Yeah that was pretty pathetic, but i'm torn on whether to agree with the strategy or not. On one hand, you need to represent your country and its citizens in these games with all you got. On the other, the competitor in me who wants to ultimately win no matter what, sees this as really smart! Should the players get all the grief when the format of the tournament you are trying to win rewards this kind of effort?

[Don]

If they want to lose that badly, they can just forfeit the game. I assume that's still an option and the fans can get their money back. Not sure what happens if both team tried to forfeit though.

[Zeus]

Yeah that was pretty pathetic, but i'm torn on whether to agree with the strategy or not. On one hand, you need to represent your country and its citizens in these games with all you got. On the other, the competitor in me who wants to ultimately win no matter what, sees this as really smart! Should the players get all the grief when the format of the tournament you are trying to win rewards this kind of effort?

I don't blame the players at all. It's how the tourney was set up. The strategy is to better your position by losing. What's wrong with that? The idea is to win, period. No one remembers the second place team

[Shrinweck]

Taking advantage of a flawed system is inherently dishonest. This kind of conduct just to further your country's medal count just makes them all look like the biggest assholes. It's an implied honor system and the fact that some of the players are trying to defend themselves proves how untrustworthy those specific players are. There's supposed to be a higher ideal at work than the greed to win the gold. The Olympics more than any other tournament should be a place to always do your best rather than a place you go to win just another game.

[Don]

I missed the part where Badminton is the only sport in the world where the #1 seed can lose before the qualifying round ends and get dropped to #2 or #3 and thus a different side of the bracket than expected. Clearly this has never happened in any other sports that features a round robin system.

[Flip]

Im surprised it doesnt happen more often in the soccer world cup round robin rounds to draw easier matchups.

[Zeus]

Taking advantage of a flawed system is inherently dishonest. This kind of conduct just to further your country's medal count just makes them all look like the biggest assholes. It's an implied honor system and the fact that some of the players are trying to defend themselves proves how untrustworthy those specific players are. There's supposed to be a higher ideal at work than the greed to win the gold. The Olympics more than any other tournament should be a place to always do your best rather than a place you go to win just another game.

Please. The object is to win, period. You do it however you can. There's no "honour", there's winning. Anyone who thinks anything else is deluding themselves

[Shrinweck]

It goes against every value of sportsmanship and if that's how you see the Olympics then what would be the point of them at all? Just to see which country is backhanded enough to win the most events? The Olympics committee tries to instill some kind of integrity into the games and like I said taking advantage of rules to this degree is inherently dishonest. No one's going to remember the assholes that took advantage of the rules to win, either. If you aren't doing your best then just go home - would rather see someone mediocre doing their best then the greatest in the world employing a strategy like this to win. Part of the Olympics is also giving spectators a spectacle to watch. I would be incredibly pissed off if I paid to go to an Olympic event where a participant was going into it with the intention of throwing it just to get into a more opportune position the next day.

Doing your best while still pacing yourself for later is a part of several of the events. Circumventing that to be greedy deserves a level of punishment.

And don't misconstrue my use of honor in the first post. I wasn't talking about a code of honor between participants, but a level of integrity between them where rules are concerned (i.e. the honor system). Amounts of good ol' fashioned rivalry is to be expected.

[Flip]

Would have loved it if one of those teams trying to lose decided to play their best and smash volleys in the other teams face.

[Don]

Im surprised it doesnt happen more often in the soccer world cup round robin rounds to draw easier matchups.

It actually happens, though people usually go for 0-0 draws in this case, and there's obviously still a risk here because what if you go for a draw and then the other team scored. Also, an equivalent here would be people kicking the ball inside their own goal to lose. 0-0 draw is pretty boring but is viewed as strategically acceptable since you could actually screw that up and lose.

[Zeus]

Olympics has always and shall always be about nothing but making money for the IOC. Everything else is a façade. I don't see playing within the rules to win, even if it means purposely throwing a match, as an issue. They didn't do anything against the rules, it's just a part of the strategy based on how the system is set up. You don't like it? Change the system

[Don]

There's a thread on this in Sirlin.net too and I think one of guy pointed out that this isn't some kind of 8 man Street Fighter tournament where you're trying to decide who is the best Street Fighter player in the world and you don't really care about what others think about the result.

Changing the structure is impractical. Round robin tournaments have been used consistently for just about any sport and they more or less work. The last year's NBA. The Heat was 2nd seed and obviously heavily favored, so people would like to avoid the 7th seat position even if it means dropping to the 8th seat. Teams do manuever for position but the length of the NBA season makes it pretty hard/dangerous to try to purposely drop from 7th to 8th when you can just shoot for 6th instead (better position than 8th, presumably), or lose so much that you fall out of 8th completely. While tanking games, teams also just put the bench players which you can at least argue on injury issues, and even backup NBA players generally provide a good performance. There was a game where the T-Wolves had Mark Madsen shoot like 5 3s in a minute in order to lose a 5 point lead with 1 minute left in a clear effort to tank. That was noted by the NBA and while I don't think any action occurred, that only happened once and games are rarely this egregious.

Now having more games in the pool play would make it harder to tank but obviously you don't have that much time in certain tournaments. Starting all the games at the same time would help, except the Olympics is about money so it'd be pretty hard to follow it if every game started at exactly at the same time because then you can only see one game at a given time period and that's it. You can talk about some weird stuff like reseed after each round or have winner pick their opponent or whatever but someone will almost certainly figure out a way to abuse that too. Heck, China is accused of match fixing when the tournament structure is supposedly rigid. If they can pick their own opponents they would either never play their own teams, or always play their own teams and just have one team forfeit immediately if it's advantageous to do so, and nobody wants to see fixed game like that even if it gives you the best opportunity to win.

Another key point is that all the players were warned they could be DQed for continuing to throw the match based on the 'not playing at your best' clause. That is, "not playing your best" is a rule that can DQ you the game. Therefore if you're playing to win, you'd obviously want to avoid getting DQ from the tournament. Since the players ignored the warning for DQ, they were obviously not trying to win as they ultimately all got DQed. And no just the fact that 'not playing your best' is subjective doesn't matter. It's a rule and you agree to subject yourself to some judge who will decide what's 'not playing your best', and in this case virtually any observer agreed these guys aren't 'playing their best'. It's not any different than say in soccer you agree to whatever the ref decides even if there is no apparent reason for the foul he's calling. Everyone knows this rule and you've to win within what seems to be not only subjective but often impenetrable ruling. For example you'll see the host for Olympics in soccer usually get further than they ought to based on their historical strength because they get bailed out on bogus calls from refs (I rememeber South Korea won in OT in World Cup even though the opposing team scored first but the ref waved it off and there was no apparent reason why that goal was not allowed). People accept that the host/home court team in soccer has an advantage in what's obviously a subjective field (objectively you shouldn't just get favorable calls on your home turf, a foul is a foul at home or at the road) and they play within rules. You agree to the subjective opinion of a judge because he's presumably an expert and in this case pretty much everyone can agree that none of these teams were 'playing to the best their ability'.

[SineSwiper]

Taking advantage of a flawed system is inherently dishonest. This kind of conduct just to further your country's medal count just makes them all look like the biggest assholes. It's an implied honor system and the fact that some of the players are trying to defend themselves proves how untrustworthy those specific players are. There's supposed to be a higher ideal at work than the greed to win the gold. The Olympics more than any other tournament should be a place to always do your best rather than a place you go to win just another game.

True, but if that flawed system is still in place after this, then the whole game is forfeit. Everybody else does single elimination. Get with the program.

[Shrinweck]

It does bring up an interesting idea of whether they should give in and change the system or push the point of sportsmanship and keep it the way it is.

[Zeus]

It does bring up an interesting idea of whether they should give in and change the system or push the point of sportsmanship and keep it the way it is.

No way. Olympics, like any other professional sports, is all about winning. You have to set the rules accordingly.

And if you don't think Olympians are pros, ask yourself this: what do any of the gold medal winners do for a real job?

[Don]

Um all major pro sports in America plays a pool format to single elminiation. The only difference is the number of games involved (i.e. 82 games for 'pool play' in NBA versus 3 in badminton).

There's nothing wrong with the structure that'd warrant changing it. When people try to get the 7th or the 8th seed and tank a game, they didn't shoot at their own basket. If they did, that team would probably face some serious disciplinary action from the NBA. Again, you can't be 'playing to win' if you fail to get past the refs, because you've to at least be able to fool the refs or you flat out just lose. Faking an injury in soccer can get you thrown out of the game. You can do whatever you want to try to get an edge, but the implication is that if your acting is so bad that it failed to fool the guy making the call then you lose.

This isn't like someone thought of a new loophole and then having rules pasted and applied retroactively. In almost any major sports the refs always had the power to throw out anything that looks egregiously wrong and this was one of them. The Olympic oath and all that doesn't even matter. You fail to get past the guy, the referee, who is supposed to make a subjective call, so you got no right to complain because you can't even put up a decent act.

[SineSwiper]

Maybe when figuring out seeds, but when it comes March Madness time for college basketball, it's a single elimination tourney. World Series of Poker is a single elimination tourney. Tennis is a single elimination tourney. Soccer is a single elimination tourney. Football is a single elimination tourney. Hockey is a single elimination tourney. Baseball is a single elimination tourney. Even the NBA is a single elimination tourney.

Seeding is just the part BEFORE the tourney. The Olympics is no place for figuring out seeds. That should have already been done in the try outs.

[Don]

Plenty of Olympic sports figure out the seeds before the eliminatino round.

In the Spain versus Brazil game there's apparently an incentive for both team to lose because winning the game would put them in USA's bracket which is obviously not a good thing. We don't know if either of the team attempted to throw the game but at least there's nothing egregious about the game so nobody complained.

In the Naruto exam where you got to cheat to pass they were saying like to be a respectable ninja you can't be caught or something along these lines. Same thing here. You can't fake a game (against the rules) and then cry about it when you get caught. If you faked an injury in soccer and fooled nobody you get thrown out too. You don't get to say, "I was just doing what I can to win" because you obviously didn't do it well enough. Faking injuries is part of soccer, but you've to at least make it look convincing and if you can't, it's actually against the rules. No difference here.