Dateline Beijing /Jerry Sullivan at the Olympics
U.S. goose cooked in Olympic badminton
BEIJING — Howard Bach and Bob Malaythong were pretty confident going in. A day earlier, they had become the first U. S. badminton players ever to reach an Olympic quarterfinal. Malaythong told a national reporter before the match he had a feeling they were about to make history. As it turned out, they did a lot better job making commercials.
You’ve probably seen Bach and Malaythong. They’re the two guys who appear in a badminton commercial for Vitamin- Water with Red Sox star David Ortiz and Brian Urlacher of the Chicago Bears. Ortiz and Urlacher get a little too energized and the spot ends with the shuttlecock embedded in Malaythong’s left thigh. Click here to see the ad.
Funny stuff. It wasn’t quite so funny Wednesday afternoon at the Beijing University of Technology Gymnasium, where Bach and Malaythong took on the top Chinese doubles team of Fu Haifeng and Cai Yun in the biggest match in the brief, undistinguished history of U. S. Olympic badminton.
No U. S. team has won a medal since badminton was put into the Olympics in 1992. The sport has been dominated by the Chinese, for whom badminton is something of a national obsession. If this were women’s softball, you can bet the IOC would be devising ways to toss badminton out of the Games.
Still, Bach and Malaythong felt they could hang with the taller, more gifted Chinese after dusting South Africa in the first round. Wrong. It was as one-sided as the commercial.
Fu and Cai zipped out to an 8-0 lead in the first set. So much for taking the crowd out of the game. The Chinese let up briefly in the second set, then went on an 11-1 run to put the overmatched Americans away in two tidy sets, 21-9, 21-10. Bach, a native of Vietnam, and Malaythong, who was born in Laos, hardly knew what hit them. It was over in less than half an hour.
The crowd loved it. Badminton crowds are notoriously raucous in China. The players are big stars here. Lin Dan, the top singles player, is a matinee idol with the teen set here. His relationship with the top women’s player is the stuff of tabloid gossip. Yes, they have tabloids here.
Fans chant and wave flags and take photographs of the players at the Games, as if they were movie stars. Families bring their small children, who have painted faces and big, contented smiles. There are even cheerleaders.
“The score was wide, but I felt we competed,” said Malaythong. “Every rally we had a chance. They just don’t make any mistakes. Everybody makes mistakes, but it takes them a while. I didn’t know what the hell was going on.”
It was some consolation for Bach and Malaythong to know that they’ve raised the profile of badminton in the U. S., where the game suffers from a lack of funding and public attention. They’re hoping that the rare moment in the spotlight, on top of the TV commercial, will bring more players and resources to their sport.
“Yeah, we’ve come a long way,” said Malaythong, 28, whose sister fled Laos in 1980 and sent for him years later. “We’ve won international tournaments, and I think our name is huge in America. So hopefully, we can bring more people to badminton. I’m going into coaching, so maybe I can coach the next Olympic champion.”
Given time and exposure, badminton could catch on in the States. We’ve all played, right? But this isn’t a leisurely game out back by the barbecue, people. These guys have serious game. The shuttlecock, a piece of cork wrapped in goat skin with 16 goose feathers attached to one end, travels at speeds up to 150 mph.
Imagine Rafael Nadal and Roger Federer slamming a tennis ball back at one another from about 10 feet away for an entire point. It’s one long, relentless volley, with players elevating for vicious overhead slams and the opponents frantically deflecting the goose feathers back over to the other side.
China has won eight of the 19 gold medals since badminton became an Olympic sport, Korea and Indonesia five each. So it’s a Southeast Asian specialty. There was a small contingent of American fans at the match, but whenever they began cheering, “USA, USA,” they were drowned out by loud, percussive chants of “China, China.”
Bach said it’s like that in other countries, too. For some reason, fans take to badminton the way college kids do to big-time basketball in the U. S. Hey, after the butt-whipping we put on Yao Ming and the Chinese hoops squad a few days ago, the hosts were entitled to some harmless gloating.
“Medals are important,” said Bach, who was in his second Olympics. “My buddy Apolo Anton Ohno [the short-track speed skating Olympic star] told me you can win world championships, but until you win a gold medal in the Olympics nobody cares. Still, I told Bob to have a lot of fun. It’s the journey that counts.”
Sadly, it’s a single-elimination journey. Bach and Malaythong say it wasn’t as one-sided as the score suggested. What else are they going to say? It was that bad. At least no one ended up with a shuttlecock stuck in his leg. At least, not that I noticed.
