Apparently the IOC are having issues with organising a tournament with a group stage. They decided to stagger the final games, probably in order to make more cash, of the group stages. The competitors took notice of the results of the games played before them and some deliberately tried to lose games to play “easier” opponents in the semis.
The IOC and the World Badminton bods then punished the players for doing exactly what an intelligent team would do.
“We are very, very sorry that this has happened, both for the players and for the sport,” said Thomas Lund, chief executive of the Badminton World Federation (BWF). But addressing the media at Wembley Arena, where the previous evening crowds had booed and jeered leading players as they repeatedly hit shots wide or into the net, Lund rejected the notion that officials should have predicted the fiasco.
Yes nobody who has ever organised a tournament with a group phase has ever encountered such activity before or thought of a way to deal with it. Oh wait…. you mean FIFA, UEFA and other major organisations did and it was implemented quite a while back, 1982 to be precise when Germany and Austria did something very similar. But unlike the BWA, FIFA recognised that the error was theirs, not the teams involved and dealt with it. Now they ensure that the final games in group stages are played at the same time, so it is very difficult for such behaviour to occur.
The players didn’t cheat, the arrogance, ignorance and hubris of the olympic organisers and the sport’s governing bodies allowed them to utilise a tactic to try and get to the final in a more straight forward manner.
Don’t blame the players, blame the greedy incompetents who thought this up without doing their due diligence and then tried to make excuses afterwards,
What really hurts is that the assholes who scheduled for the commercials still got their damned money.
that’s all the IOC cares about