Friday, August 03, 2012

Playing to Win in Badminton

Playing to Win in Badminton "It's an embarrassing time for Olympic badminton. But not because some players lost on purpose—because someone created horrificly bad tournament rules and then tried to blame the competitors for playing to win."

For another view, I heard an NPR piece about someone that had a similar experience in high school sports. His teammates were discussing throwing a match to change the brackets. Their coach overheard and gave them a speech that stuck with him for the rest of his life. He said that when you decide to do such a thing you believe you can beat one team and can't beat another. That's arrogance for the first and cowardice for the second and both defeat the point of competition.

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