Olympic Diary: Day 7

Today I saw what has been the most objectively exciting sport to witness in person of my Olympic experience to date. Badminton (subjectively nothing will surpass the men’s cycling road race). Watching the matches I couldn’t help but wonder why this wasn’t a more popular sport.

And not more popular in terms of numbers, seeing as it has the second highest worldwide participation after soccer, but more popular in terms of someone from America being able to name a single badminton player living or dead. Granted, even with this lack of US attention, badminton players are able to do okay financially with top ranked players like Lee Chong Wei and Lin Dan earning millions of dollars in winnings and endorsements. But it’s nothing compared to its most obvious competitor: tennis.

And why? Badminton is faster both in terms of the shots (they have a board that displays spike speeds here and I have seen it hit 358 km/hour), and the players (they cover twice the distance in badminton as they do in tennis over a shorter match), there are longer rallies (an average of 13.5 for badminton versus 3.4 for tennis), there is a wider variety of shots, and that variety is used more frequently, and from a public participation point of view it is easier to pick up and requires less space.

Reading the message boards about why tennis is more popular I came across a compelling explanation. Tennis lasts longer. If you’re buying a ticket to a sporting event and it is over after 30 minutes you don’t feel like you’ve gotten your money’s worth. The average length of a tennis match at the 2014 US Open was two hours and 44 minutes according to reference.com (with less than 20% of that time spent with the ball in play). This seems to be right around the sweet spot for the amount of time we like our professional sports to last (at least in the US).

An NBA basketball game averages two hours 15 minutes. NHL hockey two hours 20 minutes. MLB baseball: two hours 52 minutes. And American football three hours and 12 (though the actual action equals 11 minutes). With the average time of a badminton match clocking in at just over an hour, it is simply too short for our typical sports slot. That said, one way to address duration issues for “short” sports, like boxing, is to simply stack up a number of matches, in order to reach the desired “sporting event length”.

Some things I noticed and liked while watching Olympic badminton

1. How in the mixed doubles the players would give gentle bum taps of encouragement with their racquets to their partners (sidenote: badminton is the only event at the Olympics where men and women compete against each other)
2. The longest rally I saw lasted 58 strokes. I would bet the average person would have trouble just hitting a birdie in the air to themselves 58 times in a row.
3. They actually, and fairly regularly, do behind the back shots that are not for show.

4. I enjoyed how it is always a bit awkward at the end of a match when the teams or individuals have to shake hands as the net is too high to allow a natural handshake.

5. I liked how during the warm up for a men’s singles match the player from Sri Lanka rallied for a while with his opponent and then hit a winner and walked off, effectively ending the warm up. Power move.

6. I didn’t really like this, but noticed during a match that the Danish fans started chanting “Denmark, Denmark!” when their team was up 15–14 and serving. I’m no badminton expert but it seemed very distracting to me (they chanted right through the serve). Denmark lost the point and went on to lose to their Chinese opponents 21–15, not scoring another point.

7. The synchronized sit-down by the line judges was great. I was also kind of amazed how many there were for each match (I counted 11).

8. I really liked how supportive the Indonesian fans were.

I was also curious whether they always sang happy birthday after winning a match.

Final conclusion? Do yourself a favor and go watch some high level badminton next time you get the chance.