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Hellbent

Olympians D'Qed for intentionally losing

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Can you imagine this happening in the World Cup? Kinda ridiculous.

http://abcnews.go.com/Sports/wireStory/badminton-booed-top-doubles-pairs-16901015#.UBl4wTFSTA4


Teams blamed the introduction of a round-robin stage rather than a straight knockout tournament as the main cause of the problem. The round-robin format can allow results to be manipulated to earn an easier matchup in the knockout round.

The Chinese players tried to rig the draw after its second-seeded pair unexpectedly lost to a Danish team in the morning. That placed the No. 2 pair on course for a semifinal meeting with Wang and Yu, instead of the final.

Wang and Yu then deliberately set out to lose so they would go into the bottom half of the draw. They hardly exerted themselves, and neither did the South Koreans, drawing jeers of derision from the crowd and warnings from the umpire and tournament referee Torsten Berg. Wang and Yu eventually got what they wanted by losing.

An hour later, the South Korean team of Ha and Kim took to the court and decided to also try to lose to the Indonesians to avoid meeting Wang and Yu in the quarterfinals. Early on, all four players were warned by the umpire for not trying hard, and Berg returned and produced black cards to disqualify both pairs, but the cards were rescinded on a promise of better play.

In the third game, Berg reappeared to urge them to finish, and the Indonesians ended up being better at losing than Ha and Kim, who fell into the playoff they didn't want with the world champions.

One of the world's top male players, 2004 Olympic singles champion Taufik Hidayat of Indonesia, called the situation a "circus match."

Beijing badminton silver medalist Gail Emms said the matches were embarrassing to watch.

"It was absolutely shocking," she said. "The crowds were booing and chanting 'Off, off, off.'"

Four badminton teams were kicked out of the women's doubles at the London Games on Wednesday for trying to lose on purpose, conduct that a top IOC executive said strikes at the heart of Olympic competition.

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Hellbent said:

Can you imagine this happening in the World Cup?

Which world cup? Badminton or some other sport?

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Tsk tsk, lazy bastards. I'd DQ them as well for sportsmanship. They're insulting their country by intentionally losing despite being weeded out from millions of other applicants. It might be for the same objective, but I feel that it is obtained in a dirty way.

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Hellbent said:

Can you imagine this happening in the World Cup? Kinda ridiculous.

the other teams say this has been happening for several years now, so... yes. except it's called world championship, not world cup.

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couldn't agree more with this decision, it's about sporting integrity, just wish things like this would happen in other sports like football.

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Catoptromancy said:

Point of game is to win. If losing on purpose is a legitimate strategy for winning then game is flawed.


It's based on the shitty tournament setup, not the game itself.

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Hellbent said:

The Football World Cup

Oh that world cup. Frankly, I wouldn't expect anything as interesting as this to happen in the football world cup, much less the governing body having the spine to make a sensible decision about it.

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There's obviously something wrong with the tournament when you can improve your medal chances by losing.

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Wow Enjay

as much as I dislike Soccer, I enjoy the spectacle of the world cup. It's much more interesting than the olympics.

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I was incredibly skeptical at first but then I watched a video of the Chinese team and it was utterly appalling. I was so sure there was no way the charges could be real. I thought, "Well maybe they had an off day, that isn't fair," but dear God, I couldn't believe my eyes. To say that they made rookie mistakes is an insult to rookies. Ugh, it's just disgraceful to go all the way to the Olympics and play worse than me and my sisters did in our back yard when we were growing up.

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Mr. T said:

I dislike Soccer

Okay, just a second here. I don't mean to derail my own thread, but WHATT?!?!?!!

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As usual, most people are being morons and blaming the players for not trying to win. The real blame belongs with the retards who designed the rules such that it incentivized the players to lose.

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AndrewB said:

As usual, most people are being morons and blaming the players for not trying to win. The real blame belongs with the retards who designed the rules such that it incentivized the players to lose.

What's the worst that could happen? No girl is emotionally destroyed? I can live with that.

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Enjay said:

Oh that world cup. Frankly, I wouldn't expect anything as interesting as this to happen in the football world cup, much less the governing body having the spine to make a sensible decision about it.

Oh, there have been matches in the soccer world cup where both sides were trying not to win for reasons similar to these. It's just less obvious in soccer (well, short of them deliberately scoring own goals), because so little happens anyway.

If the format is getting criticized for creating this problem, then let's pin the blame on there being any kind of knockout stages at all. A pure round-robin (or multiple stages of them) is much fairer.

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Hellbent said:

Okay, just a second here. I don't mean to derail my own thread, but WHATT?!?!?!!


Soccer is a queer sport (not that there's anything wrong with being gay.)

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AndrewB said:

As usual, most people are being morons and blaming the players for not trying to win. The real blame belongs with the retards who designed the rules such that it incentivized the players to lose.


The rules may be stupid, but it's not moronic to blame the players. The players are doing something obviously wrong and unsportsmanlike. They can go to Hell for that. At least the Chinese teams were willing to accept when they were called on it. The Koreans and Indonesians went full retard.

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Simply put, the people who designed the badminton tournament set up and the players that tried to throw their matches to get a favourable draw are in the wrong. End of story. Hopefully this will not happen again.

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On the subject of unsportsmanlike behaviour and intentionally violating "the spirit of the game":

A bizarre incident occurred in the qualification to the 1994 Carribbean Cup in what has been labelled as one of the strangest football games of all time. At fault was an insane implementation of the golden goal rule, in which a golden goal counted as *two* goals.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbados_4%E2%80%932_Grenada_%281994_Caribbean_Cup_qualification%29

In the last and deciding group match, Barbados played Grenada for a place in the Caribbean Cup. Grenada were poised to go through unless Barbados could pull out a win by a two goal margin.

Barbados were up 2-0 in the final minutes, when Grenada pulled one back. With only a few minutes of play remaining and the score 2-1 to Barbados, the Barbados players quickly realized that, instead of pushing for 3-1, they would have a better chance to go through if they instead scored an own goal, making it 2-2 and forcing the game into overtime, wherein they would advance if scoring a golden goal, since these counted as two goals (making it 4-2).

So Barbados intentionally scored an own goal in the 87th minute. However, with the score now 2-2 and less than three minutes remaining before overtime, the Grenada players realized that they could advance either by scoring another goal and winning the game outright, or by scoring an own goal themselves, making it 3-2 to Barbados (resulting in an insufficient win margin and sending Grenada through). So now, Barbados players frantically defended *both* goals as Grenada tried to score at either end.

There's a short YouTube video of the game, available via the Wikipedia article.

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Hellbent said:

Okay, just a second here. I don't mean to derail my own thread, but WHATT?!?!?!!

You're an American. Aren't you supposed to scoff at the European concept of "football" with disdain and mockery, simultaneously boasting the merits of (American) football?

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Hellbent said:

Can you imagine this happening in the World Cup?

Already happened, in 1982: West Germany vs. Austria. After that, they changed the rules.

The Badminton players were acting in their own rational self interest and frankly I don't blame them for it. The fault lies with the Olympic organisers, who set up a situation that provided the players with an incentive to do this.

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Mr. T said:

Wow Enjay
as much as I dislike Soccer, I enjoy the spectacle of the world cup. It's much more interesting than the olympics.

Enjay should have said:

Oh that world cup. Frankly, I wouldn't expect anything as interesting as this to me...


Personally, I would like the football world cup to fuck off and die along with everything else associated with that shit sport.

Whatever you do, don't ask me about football... ;)

Probably best if I don't post in this thread again. :P

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tl;dr

Aren't teams normally supposed to be penalized when it is found out that they played non-combat? What's the outrage for?

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Catoptromancy said:
Point of game is to win. If losing on purpose is a legitimate strategy for winning then game is flawed.

If the point were just to win, there would be no problem with what these guys did, but the point is excellence and sportsmanship, and winning is there to drive these. In cases of abuse like this I think you have to consider how insidious or hard to detect the abuse is before changing the rules, because you don't want to encourage rule bending abuses when arbitration is also an option or tool. This brings to mind map01 matches in ZDaemon, with two approaches: change the map or punish obvious camping abuse.

For instance, in games with periods of inactivity or occasional stops, it might not be necessary to instate strict limits for these breaks, but if the solution always depended on the rules, people would be encouraged to abuse every rule they could. That could possibly ruin aspects of the game that enhance the sport and work well along with a good arbiter.

If sportsmanship matters, so does the attitude of the players, and you can't expect to replace that integrity only with strictures and rules.

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Throw them out of the tournament. There, done. There is nothing wrong with how it is set up. If you want to throw games to get "a more favorable position" then that position will be a spot on the plane back home with no medal. If they want to lose so bad on purpose, give their opponents byes and a shot at the medal and say to hell with them. In a sport where China dominates, going back there with no medal should be an even bigger disgrace than throwing games* so why do it?

*assuming the Chinese governing body of badminton didn't put them up to it, in which case no medals will be just the beginning of the IOC's potential punishment.

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