Badminton fans across Asia took to social media on Thursday to express anger and embarrassment over the Olympic match-fixing scandal, with 3.7 million posts on one microblogging site alone. In the sport’s powerhouse China, popular rage at disgraced star Yu Yang, who along with her partner was deemed by the World Badminton Federation to have lost a match on purpose, melted away after she vowed to quit the game.
The scandal, which saw eight players disqualified, topped the list of hottest topics on the Chinese site Weibo with more than 3.7 million posts. Many microbloggers in China and across the region blamed the match-throwing on the system rather than the players, who it said were encouraged to lose qualifying matches so that they faced easier opponents in the later stages. “Might as well retire, many countries need you, and maybe in those places no one will order you not to win your next match,” wrote one user identified as Flower Hat. “Our country as a whole likes to exploit loopholes,” said a microblogger called Qiao Jiujun. The scandal reflected shortcomings in China’s social system and its short-sighted obsession with gold medals, he wrote.
