Simon Jenkins thinks the outrage at China's badminton team's throwing games is off-base:
Day and after day we read relentless hyperbole about the vital importance to national pride of winning: not winning a heat or a round or an exhibition, but winning medals. So obsessed is the media with this single index that the BBC has stopped displaying the medals table because it is too humiliating. This is the pastiche chauvinism of a banana republic.
Along come the Chinese, who clearly know how to win. You plan. The badminton heats were apparently staged to give an incentive, in certain circumstances, to losing games in the qualifying stages. Faced with the risk of a tougher opponent later and thus losing a medal, the players did what their tacticians said. They lost a round. I cannot see how, in sporting terms, this is any different from sprint cyclists hovering for an age on a curve, waiting for the right moment to surge forward. Anyway, the athletes were not trying to lose, they were losing so as being more likely to win.
That latter point is surely salient. Honing tactics to have a better chance at winning is not the same as throwing a game for money. And there's an obvious solution: go back to knock-out rounds.
The Dish 