The Olympic badminton pairs that were disqualified for trying to lose

On August 1, 2012, eight Olympic badminton players were disqualified from the London tournament for trying to lose. 1

The matches that caused the uproar had taken place the previous evening at Wembley Arena. Four women's doubles pairs served into the net, hit shots wide, and generally played as if the point were an inconvenience. They were not hiding a lack of ambition very well: spectators booed, and the referee warned them. 2

That is the first great oddity here. In most sports, losing is the problem. In this Olympic group stage, losing could improve a team's route to the medals.

London's women's doubles tournament used a group stage before the knockout rounds. That gave pairs more matches, but it also made the final group results matter beyond simple qualification: a team could influence which opponent waited in the quarterfinals. The format had replaced a straight knockout setup, and the later rule change showed that the draw itself had created the incentive. 4

China's top-seeded Wang Xiaoli and Yu Yang had already qualified. According to the contemporary reports, they wanted to avoid meeting their No. 2-seeded Chinese teammates until the final, so a loss could be more useful than a win. That logic spilled into the other side of the draw: both South Korean pairs and Indonesia's pair were also accused of trying to steer their quarterfinal path. 25

The four pairs named in the ruling were:

Four pairs meant eight athletes, but the embarrassment was larger than the number. These were not unknown entrants stumbling through a preliminary round: China's pair were the world champions, and the entire women's doubles quarterfinal bracket had become entangled in a tactical argument about whom not to face. 4

The Badminton World Federation did not have to invent a new penalty. It cited two existing sections of its Players' Code of Conduct: Section 4.5, "not using one's best efforts to win a match," and Section 4.16, "conducting oneself in a manner that is clearly abusive or detrimental to the sport." 6

That wording made the scandal unusually visible. A normal strategic decision—conserving energy after qualifying, for example—can look like smart tournament management. Serving into the net and sending routine shots wide, in a match that spectators could watch unravel point by point, looked like an attempt to turn the draw into a private spreadsheet. The BWF charged all four pairs, and their places in the last eight went to the pairs that had finished third and fourth in the relevant groups. 3

The punishment was disqualification from the competition, not removal from the Olympic Games entirely. 1 Their stated tactical problem was the medal route: the format gave them a reason to believe that a loss could help.

The oddest part of the story is that the scandal was partly a design problem. In November 2012, the BWF changed the Olympic doubles draw rules: group winners would receive fixed knockout positions, while second-place teams would enter another draw to determine their opponents. The stated aim was to remove the incentive to lose deliberately. 4

So the lasting image from August 1 is not simply eight athletes being punished. It is a tournament reaching a point where the best tactical move was to make the sport look ridiculous—and then rewriting the bracket so that losing stopped being such a good plan.

One sentence to keep: At the 2012 Olympics, four women's doubles pairs were disqualified after trying to lose group matches for a better knockout draw, turning "not trying" into a rule violation that changed the format. 46