Slower, Lower, Weaker

The world is puzzling over how such a thing could happen: Four womens’ badminton duos, including China’s world champion pair, disqualified for intentionally losing. (AP Photo/file)

The world is puzzling over how such a thing could happen: Four womens’ badminton duos, including China’s world champion pair, disqualified for intentionally losing.

>>Video: Players try to throw match

NBC was showing slow-motion replays of shuttlecocks that didn’t even get past the net. Slow motion shots of shots that were already in slow motion.

It was like watching a four-way stop.

The crowd booed.

And to make it even worse, they’re not going to get their money back.

But this is not unusual. Badminton teams have done this before.

Because the way the badminton brackets are set up, good teams which are already guaranteed a place in the finals, can draw a weaker opponent if they lose in the preliminaries.

Now you may ask — why would anyone design a tournament that way? Because they were relying on the Olympic spirit. They assumed that in the spirit of “faster higher stronger”, athletes would go all out no matter what.

But out here in the REAL world, we know it’s all about incentives: What do I have to do to win?

And when the incentives are wrong — as they clearly are in this particular bracket system — well, I thought the BBC put it pretty well.

“The thing is well once you start to try to lose, and it’s obvious that the other side of the net they’re trying to lose as well, it’s a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy. Your badminton gets worse and worse and worse to try and be worse than the people that are trying to be worse.”

Why, that’s the very definition of a race to the bottom, isn’t it? And I heard that and I realized — this country’s been stuck in a bad badminton game! With all the top players are standing around trying to decide if it’s worth competing.

And we want to blame the players, when in fact we’re just trapped in a crazy system.