The gist is that she was ordered to lose in one World Table Tennis Championships, but refused and proceeded to be the champion.
Later she wasn't selected for the next Olympic, which she felt was the punishment for her disobedience. She later immigrated to Japan and played for their national team and gave China some trouble for a while.
The funny thing is, they do that in table tennis (actually also badminton in some other cases other than the one in the article) not even just to secure the gold medal: since China is/was so dominant in this sport, they sometimes do it to ensure certain player can get his/her "grand slam" [2] (to win all the major tournaments in their career).
Chinese table tennis is full of such cases. This is their national sport, this is were they dominate.
Many Chinese players fall out with their brutal system. Either they barge and do nothing, like Liu Shiwen in the last decade, who was the very best player, but had some terrible losses to non-chinese players. Thus she was not allowed to play Olympics as World No #1. The most upsetting thing is that she lost to Ex-Chinese players, who left the system and played for Korea or Singapore. Some even for European countries, but only one ex-Top 10 player.
He Zhili played for Japan, Harimoto Tomukazu's parents also left the Chinese system at very young age and played for Japan. Last Olympics were extremely stressful for China because of this Ex-Chinese player who won against the very best, effectively unbeatable Chinese superstars, with new techniques. Then the Chinese looked very vulnerable because several European players also took that up and beat the GOAT Ma Long in a series of losses. Some 2nd rank Bejing politician took his chances and fired the coaches, the 3 best players defended their coaches and wanted to protect their superior system from some amateur destroying everything for his political chances. So the whole team was recalled from the ongoing World Championships, and didn't play for the next years. (Ma Long also had a knee injury). A new young Chinese protege didn't turn out to be winner against Harimoto, so after 3 years the old trainer at least in the men's team was allowed to come back, the old players won again, and China won almost all gold medals. They just lost one, even if they developed a secret win strategy against their biggest opponent, a young Japanese, and surprised them in the finals, but Liu Shiwen's partner fell off, and they lost Mixed Doubles. So Liu Shiwen is now forever dirty, not winning any Olympics gold. But she stayed in the system, and still is best paid player worldwide. She will probably retire this year.
However, no Ex-Chinese player ever won a gold medal against them. This would be their worst upset, it might even trigger a downfall of the political system.
Some addition to your comment. The players that join Singapore is to get chances to compete Internationally. China has too many good table tennis players. Even their second and third-rate national players are still considered top International players.
Not a joke. The politician are not their national heros. And if a vice-major of Bejing is able to blow up the Chinese dominance in their most favorite sport caused by incompetence and for his pure selfish political advances, major disruptions could have been expected.
I guess it's simply an honor to have, and if you (the country) are going to win anyway, why not?
Keep in mind it's not any "particular" individual, everyone take turns. So if you're "close", you have the priority. If you already have one? Well you can try to not push so hard.
And it's not like it happens all the time, just in a few cases. It's still largely merit-based especially for things like Olympics trial, you have to earn it no matter who you are.
It's a regular thing in other sports, as well. The number of times it has caused controversy in Formula-One, with a safety driver told to lose, is probably not even worth counting. (Everyone does it, but they're not supposed to).
It has something to do with prestige and respect, often enforced by the team owner. Lewis Hamilton made his first huge win by ignoring such an instruction.
Not only told to loose. I think in at least one case someone was told to crash, completely blocking the raceway on an already narrow curve. I wouldn't be surprised if that where common even as in some sports one bad racer can take out half the competition.
Sorry but having watched every race and attended 11 in the last decade+, I know not only that the event you are imagining didn't happen in the modern era, it simply would not happen to any team during any season.
The penalties for rebuilding a car are reason enough. Being able to hide a coded message for "crash the car" would mean it needs to be discussed before the race began. If the driver followed the command it would be at the risk of HIS superlicense, his entire livelihood, not just some race points for some team he's with for one season.
On the face you've offered an unsubstantiated and impossible enigma for another reader to "solve"
If it weren't for extensive F1 knowledge I might even have been confused by your obvious mistaken recollection or troll.
> Sorry but having watched every race and attended 11 in the last decade+, I know not only that the event you are imagining didn't happen in the modern era, it simply would not happen to any team during any season.
That would be the crash in 2008, to the advantage of Fernando. Renault did not contest the charges. In the words of Nelson Piquet Jr.:
> During the Formula One Grand Prix of Singapore, held on 28 September 2008 and counting towards the 2008 FIA Formula One World Championship, I was asked by Mr. Flavio Briatore, who is both my manager and the Team Principal of the Renault F1 Team, and by Mr Pat Symonds, the Technical Director of the ING Renault F1 Team, to deliberately crash my car in order to positively influence the performance of the ING Renault F1 team at the event in question. I agreed to this proposal and caused my car to hit a wall and crash during lap thirteen/fourteen of the race.
> Lewis Hamilton made his first huge win by ignoring such an instruction.
Excuse me, what exactly are you referring to? His first GP win was just a regular race without any controversy, and his first championship win was... not impressive, to say it mildly. He did everything to lose and was only saved by Timo Glock slipping on the last lap.
It is also known that Hamilton was always favoured by the team owners and often benefitted from team orders throughout his career.
I’m not sure what you mean by safety driver, but F1 is explicitly a team sport, and team orders are a part of the sport rather than a form of cheating. As much as the fans like to complain about it, there’s only really a few controversial cases that stand out in peoples memories, like the multi 21 race (which ultimately had 0 impact on the championship).
That's one of the few F1 races I remember. (it wasn't Alonso, though, it was Barrichello). That was dramatic. If I remember correctly, Schumacher gave the trophy to Barrichello at the podium as a gesture to show that he was the one who deserved it and Barrichello couldn't hold back the tears.
I think they meant "second" driver. Clearly an autocorrect or brainfart.
We know it's a team sport but the star of the show is usually just one guy. Even though they often praise the team and everyone back in the factory, the glory is always directed at the drivers. And in most cases, one particular driver. The star.
Clearly the second drivers have to deal with a lot of shit... that is specified in their contracts
> ... team orders are a part of the sport rather than a form of cheating. As much as the fans like to complain about it, there’s only really a few controversial cases...
Actually, if a team order changes a ranking, and it can be proved, then the team is automatically issued a fine. Just because the team orders happen, does not actually mean that they're _allowed_ to happen. The fines are generally in the order of $100k-$250k.
Team orders have been banned in F1 since 2008 [0]:
> 152. Team orders which interfere with a race result are prohibited.
There's a reason that Smedley's quote is infamous:
> Fernando is faster than you. Can you confirm you understand that message?
> Team orders have been banned in F1 since 2008 [0]:
This statement is misleading, as it gives the appearance that this ban is still in effect. However, the ban was repealed at the end of 2010 season. [0]
That ban on team orders was repealed very soon after it was implemented. F1 is currently, and has been for nearly its entire history, a team sport, where team orders are allowed.
That's one sure way to show literally everybody how it stopped being a sport, and just became politics and ego game of few fuckers who run it behind the curtains.
One hell of a way to disgust millions of people immediately, and as you can see here and elsewhere, they will easily hold the grudge for decades. Its just a plain idiotic move to be polite. Nobody is cheering for ie team Williams, everybody is cheering for their favorite driver.
Your attempt to normalize it is so surreal. Do you also like other, proper team sports like football or hockey for all the behind the scenes politics, or actually for the sport itself?
Teamwork happens every race, and it’s very rarely controversial at all. Teammates towing each other in qualifying is teamwork. Teammates holding up rivals for each other is teamwork. Sergio Perez’s entire Abu Dhabi race last year was team work, and hardly anybody considers any of that to be controversial at all. Even most orders to give up position aren’t controversial, because most of them are drivers on split strategies being ordered not to hold the faster driver up.
F1 is just fundamentally a team sport, and hardly any of the teamwork generates any level of controversy at all. Even the (very uncommon) controversial cases of a driver being ordered to give up a race win are only a big deal to a certain segment of fans. Typically the deluded ones who think Bottas was better than Hamilton, or Webber was better than Vettel, or Barrichello was better than Schumi, and that all of those drivers would have championships if it weren’t for team orders.
Correct but it also increases the chance of a win by preventing the player from exhausting themselves in round 1 leaving them fresher for round 2 so one could see it as not much different than doping or any other form of cheating. An unfair advantage conferred by corruption.
Funnily enough, at least in this particular report, it is her coach who told the story. Really shows how this behavior was normalized enough for it not to be considered too shameful to admit.
The reason Ye and her husband are persona non grata is unrelated to the Olympic incident, but because her husband is involved in the "New Federal State of China" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Federal_State_of_China). Supposedly this is what the "fierce criticism" the article is referring to.
That's fine, but it should be fine and possible to criticize someone for their actions yet acknowledge their past sports achievements. It sounds like the Chinese media has chosen to forget their achievements.
I don't intend to criticize Ye. Her story deserves to be known regardless of whether it's been reported before or any of her possible involvement in fringe political groups.
To be clear, I'm not talking about you specifically, I'm talking about the media and online company response to her, at least that which is alledged in the article.
shows how this behavior was normalized enough for it not to be considered too shameful to admit
what's to be ashamed of? every sport becomes a tactical team sport at the olympics. it's nation vs nation. and any coach from any nation will try to do the same thing (success probably depends on the personality of the athlete)
The problem with that isn’t the goal but the means to achieve that goal.
Perhaps if they trained their players with a collective mentality where the greater good justifies letting go of personal success, this would make sense.
But I’m pretty sure that’s not the case. Most Olympic athletes create a personal goal system, especially if competing in an individual discipline.
Winning a gold medal has a profound meaning for them.
Helping their country to win a gold medal by giving up their personal chance to do it and winning a bronze medal instead has way less meaning.
So you’re not wrong, but it’s still pretty fucked up if you ask me.
That's the case in PRC athletic system, especially in events PRC dominate in, where the bench is deep enough to get multiple podium placements, so roster crafting like this happens to maximize country medal count.
> personal goal system, especially if competing in an individual discipline
This is really where individual vs collective sport systems/philosophies diverge. PRC state sport development programs are more about reflecting state capacity / winning medals than individual prestige (like USSR). Young kids from backwater shitholes with little other prospects gets recruited into the athletic development pipeline and unless they're thoroughly dominant, are just one of several alternatives that can guarantee medals in events PRC specializes in. These athletes generally aren't kids of upper middle class families from developing countries with resources to largely negotiate through the amateur sport system themselves who are then apportioned commiserate glory when they win. PRC sport developement is a more all empassing national / institutional effort - it's a team effort from day one that generates enough talent in certain events that's feasible to play team order shenanigans.
> But I’m pretty sure that’s not the case. Most Olympic athletes create a personal goal system, especially if competing in an individual discipline. Winning a gold medal has a profound meaning for them.
This.
Imagine a life time of having been hammered in day and night that you need to try harder to be the best and suffering is nothing when seeking eternal glory and win over everyone and achieve your full potential and this is your only shot...
...and then, when you are almost there, here comes the party official and says "wow not so fast there."
If there were three Danes and one Chinese left in the semis, which is not impossible given that Denmark is pretty good at badminton, the Danes would not conspire in the same way. And if they did the story would not be suppressed, and people would not consider them traitors when they came out with it.
As the comment that kicked this thread off pointed out, she's considered a traitor not for talking about the badminton conspiring, but because she is signed on to an organization openly dedicated to overthrowing the Chinese government.
It's perfectly normal for different teams to have different tactics, given the same inputs. Why should the Chinese have followed the hypothetical tactic chosen by the Danes?
Every aspect of this is loathsome. At simplest level its cheating because the fake match leaves the "winner" fresher than their opponent because their opponent had to actually complete in the first and subsequent match.
Then their is the need to lie about it a sure sign of moral wrong doing.
Then there is the act of subverting an individuals career and choices with ugly coercion that is only possible in the context of a society so broken that people may be disappeared, destroyed, or tortured for displeasing dear leader or his minions.
It's a many layered shit sandwich of gross that only appears bland when simple corruption doesn't have to give way to making good on threats.
Athletes don't train to make the Olympics so their nation can take home the most medals, they're there as individual competitors. The Olympics aren't really presented as some large metagame, it's about the actual athletics.
The individual athletes don't directly care about that, but in the UK the funding for the whole sport's Olympic programme is dictated by how many medals are won.
It creates some interesting problems which vary between the different types of sport. Pre-games the programme is going to be set up so that all the athletes cooperate to make each other better and maximise the programme's chance of success, but the athletes are also internally motivated to minimise their opponents' chance of beating them at the games.
In my experience there's plenty of meta-game going on all the time! (Disclaimer - I'm not an Olympic athlete myself, I'm just close to the programme socially in a particular sport).
I thought I did, but I don't understand your comment. I remember John Carlos and Tommie Smith upsetting the USOC with their Black Power salutes on the podium in 1968, but that was after the 100 meters was done.
Iranian athletes have been dealing with this nightmare: if in an international competition they face a competitor from Israel, they will be told that they have to avoid competing.
This is part of Iran's Islamic government's symbolic gesture to show that they do not recognize a country by that name, and so their representatives do not compete against them.
This has caused a huge amount of damage on these athletes' professional lives. Imagine an Olympic competition, you might be in the right shape to compete in the Olympic only once, and you miss that not by your chance.
No officials in Iran take the responsibility of this decision, no one knows what institute forces athletes to abandon their competition, but this continues.
Many of top athletes migrate to other countries (usually just stay in the country they are for the competition as refugees, and do not come back with the team, then they move to another country) for a chance to compete free from this restriction.
That's considered part of the team strategy in F1 to maximize the chances of getting both drivers and constructors championships. Team orders of this kind are issued at almost every race.
We don't consider it a "flaw" in soccer when one player passes the ball to another so they can score, and F1 blurs the line because there are both teams and individual standings. In singles badminton, though, it's supposed to be all about individual performance.
Quite frankly, it's an absurd comparison, and I'm not even a fan of sports.
A football team does not have a fraction of its players qualified to participate in a championship. There is no podium. The goalie is doing a completely different job from the striker.
There are team races, eg rowing, where one person cannot win and the other lose.
From what I see, F1 and other races are individual races! It just happens that individuals belong to the same organization, and therefore the organization forces some logistics shenanigans that go against the sport.
It is not. F1 drivers flouting the instructions are merely subject to consequences of insubordination at team level. Their whole lives are not erased from the national record and they are not subject to nation-level excommunication.
Controversy in 2002, now a normal accepted part of the sport. To the point of Verstappen openly saying to his team on public radio “Cmon guys now we’re really losing silly amount of time” when team orders didn’t happen fast enough. He had to wait 2 laps.
Those saying that this is normal since Olympics is about country and medal counts, the main issue is the absurdly disproportionate repercussions that were inflicted on the athlete (and her husband too) for speaking about the strategy - that, ironically, is being described as "normal". If it is normal, why they had to suffer the consequences for telling it like it is?
Olympic has always been about country and its medal counts. If it’s about best player to win, then they need to change the qualification rules for the sports.
What the Olympics is about has always been subject to debate. The tension between its modernist ideals and realpolitik was present at the start, with individualist and postmodern criticisms joining the chat later. It’s hard to imagine some starting a similar institution today, but it seems at least somewhat effective at its goal of world peace, if only by giving nations an easy, institutionalized way to gain prestige without going to war.
No, it hasn’t- the Olympics have never been a substitute for war. They have however been a great way for peaceful nations to promote themselves economically for tourism during and after the event- although not for a while with the IOCC and Olympic hosting becoming a massive opportunity for corrupt boondoggles. Even so, host country aside, the international event has created the opportunity to raise awareness and create good will towards nations that otherwise wouldn’t have any similar opportunity- the Jamaican bobsled team comes to mind.
The Crusades seem an obvious example. Why endeavor to conquer coastal desert a thousand kilometers from your kingdom instead of your neighbor’s farmland and mines. The Trojan war was about a single woman and her prestige. And WWII had fascist ideologies that were centered on proving to the world how great they were, and the proved more important than the economic motives in actually starting the war.
> The first Crusaders had a variety of motivations, including religious salvation, satisfying feudal obligations, opportunities for renown, and economic or political advantage.
"prestige" could be close to "renown", but it comes from a different place (renown brings direct advantages, including nobility attribution for instance), and you'll note economic and political advantage are set as anchors of this list.
The reality of it is about conquering territory under a pretense that won't raise hostility among your neighbors (who can even participate in the expeditions under the same religious flag)
> Many scholars believe that there is a historical core to the tale, though this may simply mean that the Homeric stories are a fusion of various tales of sieges and expeditions by Mycenaean Greeks during the Bronze Age.
> WWII
> proved more important than the economic motives
Could I ask for more details on your understanding of it as "proved" ?
I suspect that the way we watch the Olympics pretty much implies it is a country-team event. I'm pretty sure most people have their eyes on the medal count rankings, not on who exactly wins a medal (unless you are a close friend or relative of a particular athlete). So I always thought all competent national team coaches would do this kind of strategization.
>> competent national team coaches would do this kind of strategization
The Olympics is supposed to be a celebration of excellence in sport, not how to best game the system. It would be one thing to simply forfeit the match but to have to pretend to play well with the ultimately goal of losing is simply disgusting and such behaviour should absolutely be banned.
Celebration of excellence, yes. Just not personal excellence. The ancient Olympic games were already used as a political tool to assert dominance among Greek city-states. One of the points of the games since ancient Greece has been for the winning city-state to say “look, I can train my soldiers to be this good. You don’t want to mess with me.”
I think one possible explanation is that this is a weird side effect of the modern games being heavily commercialized. If athletes just quit without a fight, spectators won’t like it and tickets won’t sell.
Wait so is it a celebration of excellence or a just a commercial thing where the goal is simply to drive ticket sales? Because what you described was people putting on a show but ultimately acting out a script, like pro wrestling.
I would say you are getting to the core of the issue: conflicting expectations and interests among the IOC, the hosting country, the sponsors, the individual athletes, the national teams, the spectators both at home and at the venue:
- the IOC, the hosting country, and the sponsors probably want the spectators to think that the games are about celebration of (personal) excellence, so they say forfeiting outright is bad sportsmanship; also, athletes putting up a fight is more exciting and sells more tickets.
- at the same time, watching the medal count ranking is exciting; at least in the case of China, I believe that most people expect the national team *as a whole* to do everything they can to fetch more medals; for some people, the ability of the coach to strategize is part of the show;
- the individual athlete of course wants a gold for themself if possible, but they also kinda have to keep in mind the hopes of the people, which is "more medals *for the country*";
And you may ask "but then why don't we just allow everybody to dope? Doping makes athletes strong/faster and should result in more exciting games if everybody dopes." I would guess it's because any form of doping is probably detrimental to the human body in the long term, which makes it an obvious bad image. Besides, it's possible that doping makes your athlete "expire" sooner, and so maybe it's just not a good deal for national teams to have to do short cycles of discovering talents and training them. I'm not saying this is the case, I'm just hypothesizing out loud.
And so, given the above factors, we have this weird situation where the IOC says you shouldn't forfeit, but could "turn a blind eye" if you can put up a convincing show of a fight. I'm just hypothesizing how this happens. And I'm not making any conclusion about whether this whole thing is ethical. I'm just laying out the forces at work.
It is still somewhat unlike pro-wrestling because the national teams are really competing against each other. Within each national team, however, it may be a different story.
It seems likely that they would have been disqualified if they would have disclosed their coercive tactics. The fakery was necessary in order to get the desired outcome.
Right, if I correctly understand the page you linked, this concern about competition manipulation is relatively recent (less than 10 years ago), while the "scandal" surrounding Ye happened 20 years ago.
Keeping in mind that the scandal was known since at least as early as 2007 (according to the link pasted on another comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32670518), the IOC should have had plenty of time to investigate, if they wanted to. If I understand correctly, the IOC has not (yet) stripped any of the involved athletes of their medals, nor taken any other disciplinary action against individual athletes or the national team. This suggests that either the competition manipulation rules were not in place (in which case the Chinese team would have been still operating within the rules, strictly speaking), or the IOC didn't mean to really enforce such rules, possibly due to consideration for other interests.
I'll also add that, from the perspective of the Chinese government, athletes in the national team are basically in the service of the country because the country is usually paying for all the training, equipment, etc., and so personal sacrifices are expected. This is something any athlete joining the national team is expected to understand. Put another way, if an athlete does not agree with that, they are not supposed to join the national team to begin with. So in the eyes of some people, Ye simply didn't expect she would actually need to make that sacrifice, and got bitter about it.
And if you think the practice is unethical, I would tell you that China is simply operating from a completely different frame of ethical reference.
For China, every sport in the Olympics is a team sport, even the ones that are not explicitly described as such. While showing sportsmanship is kinda/sorta important, it is even more unethical to not do everything in one's power to respond to the hopes and expectations of the government (who provided the funding) and of the Chinese people - namely, medal count ranking. So if there is something that can be done as a team and that is not explicitly forbidden by the rules, you can bet that the Chinese team will do it even if it seems unethical to you. This should not surprise you when you consider the communist/socialist ideology, where individualism is frowned upon. In fact, they'll probably think that national teams who don't do it are being stupid.
It's a complicated beast, and has many priorities to juggle in order to ensure its own perpetuation.
A big one is that the Olympics need to keep appealing to viewers around the world. They need to stay relevant with the audience, so that they can keep getting both corporate and government money, and also wield political influence.
Stoking nationalist fervours around the world is definitely part of that appeal. But not the only one.
Maybe it shouldn’t be about the country and its medal counts then. Imagine spending the best years of your life training, only to be told to throw the match because some bureaucrats thought it was best for their country?
This whole patriotism thing in sports seems silly. Two highly trained and motivated people are playing, let the better person win the match. Why does it have to be so hard?
Maybe it is time to stop playing national anthem and play the winner’s favorite song instead. Wave a white flag instead of the national flag.
We already have these kinds of competitions. Eg the 'FIFA Club World Cup' is open to teams and their players (almost) regardless of nationality.
By and large, people still prefer watching the FIFA World Cup which is organised along national lines.
Similar for many other sports. Eg many major tennis events are typically not run along national lines; but viewers still care about nationality of the participants.
I think the point is that it might be unhealthy to promote the idea of nations and inter-national competition as a virtue, even if viewers prefer it because it stokes their tribal sentiments. Local sports is more harmless because local identity isn't often a part of tribal conflict in the modern day.
>Local sports is more harmless because local identity isn't often a part of tribal conflict in the modern day.
How do you justify this statement, or the premise? In the modern day, homicide kills many times more people than conflict between nations. In the USA at least, local identity is the primary driver of gang violence.
Homicide isn't a catastrophic tail risk. War between great powers is. The type of war that comes from revanchism and nationalism and so on. It hasn't happened in the modern era yet because of nukes, but the risk is there, and we had numerous close calls with the Soviet Union.
That's a fallacy, similar to claiming driving in a car is safer than flying in a plane because you're more likely to survive a car crash than a plane crash.
It seems you're attempting to suggest that local sports are less harmless than the Olympics, by somehow equating the latter to an increased risk of apocalyptic nuclear war?
Please provide evidence if you're going to make such an outlandish claim. One could just as easily claim (similarly without evidence) that the Olympics actually reduces the tension between nations and reduces the risk of apocalyptic tail events compared to local sports which provide no such relief of international tensions.
We're straying too far from the point I was trying to make. National identity is plausibly a dangerous thing to hold up as a virtue, irrespective of the comparison to local identity. Russia's invasion of Ukraine, China's designs over Taiwan, WW1, WW2, trade protectionism, closed borders, and so on. These things are not all about national identity, but national identity does play a non-trivial role.
>I think players should be not allowed to disclose their nationalities in the Olympics
Perhaps you should discuss this idea with some former/aspiring/current olympians. Overwhelmingly they consider it a great honor and one of the most memorable, rewarding events of their life to represent their country. Shockingly, even in countries which aren't like China where the athletes are essentially forced to say these things.
I don't watch it anymore after it became paywalled. It used to be shown on public service in the country I live, but the TV rights became too expensive, so commercial television could outbid it. I have nothing against commercial television, but I think a part of the original charm disappaered when an event originally for amateur athletes eventually narrowed their audience by going for the highest bidder. Also, the IOC is not an organization I especially like to support.
It is not the same to me any more. I think they will see a decrease in interest as it becomes less available, and it will hurt the games in the long run.
I started not watching because of, I think, some IOC related scandal. Eventually I forgot why I was boycotting it or whatever and just realized I wasn't interested anymore.
I don't think most athletes participating could afford it or the training then... Then again going fully back to amateur might be improvement. Ban any sponsors from participants from previous and following 4 years or cycle.
Here we have a sad story how Goodhart's Law overcame the Olympic spirit. The count of gold medals became more important than fair play, honestly finding out who is the best, etc.
"If you cannot win cleanly, just win" (quoting from memory).
I would have assumed this is normal strategizing for countries to do in sports, though perhaps without the same level of coercion? Obviously you want your strongest athlete to compete and you want them to get an easy win instead of tiring them out.
Teams certainly do such strategizing in sports like cycling.
I am a little surprised at how some people in the comments seem to have never heard about this sort of thing before. It is...not that uncommon, even at high levels of sport.
For example, in the "Disgrace of Gijón" [1] incident in the 1982 FIFA (Soccer) World Cup, Austria were accused of throwing a match to West Germany so both teams could advance; leading FIFA to change the schedules to prevent this from happening again (or at least make it more difficult).
The Austria/Germany farce in Spain was much different though. Two teams effectively agreed on a result to ensure they both went through at the expense of Algeria. Then not only did the world at large (including German and Austrian fans) turn against the teams, but as you say FIFA recognised it and acted against it.
In this case a single person was ordered by a powerful government to self-sacrifice with the knowledge that if she didn't her career was effectively over - you know China wouldn't think twice about pulling her funding, or choose not to select her again.
They're both very disappointing cases, but one had a very real consequence for the people and the sport involved - the other seemingly continues unabated.
You're judging it on the outcome level, which is fair I guess - the soccer one probably had a better outcome for fairness. Although these days with live telecasts and such, you could probably still cheat in a similar manner with knowledge of how the other game is going.
Considering the number of people involved in the cheating though, it seems to me that the Austria/Germany one is much worse? Two entire squads, or at least the 11 players + substitutes unanimously agreed to cheat; whereas in the China badminton case it was a couple of players and presumably at most four or five coaches and selectors above them.
I don't think there's any objective way to say whether one is worse than the other, so this totally boils down to what parts of the respective scandals annoy any one person the most. That said, I'm not 100% convinced the number of people involved (22 players + some coaches vs 2 players + coaches) contributes either way to badness.
But now that you mention outcome, I'm thinking again from the perspective of the Algerian team rather than the sport itself. They could've been the first African nation to make it out of the group stages of the world cup but were denied it by a third party, whereas I suppose at least in the Badminton case the player had some kind of agency (even if it was unlikely they'd choose not to obey the instruction to throw the game). So I'm coming around to the idea that Austria/Germany was actually worse :D
To add a lukewarm ending to the tale, Algeria eventually managed to make it out of the World Cup group stages in Brazil in 2014. Unfortunately they faced an in-form Germany and lost 2-1 after extra time. Germany would go on to win the competition, completely destroying Brazil 7-1 on the way, so Algeria maybe don't feel so hard done by that time.
In China, the goal is not to win gold medal for you, but for the country. The other girl has the higher win rate against the opponent at the final, so Ye was ordered to bunt.
I don't get it though, if Ye Zhaoying won over the other person with a higher win rate, that means she's better and can make it into the final on her own merits, no? If Gong Zhichao couldn't win a match against Ye Zhaoying, then they might not even win against Camilla Martin.
I assume badminton is a sport like tennis where skill isn’t measured along a single simple axis, e.g. some combinations of play styles and skills can be more effective against certain players and situations. The article does quote the Danish player who faced off against China in the finals:
"I saw how the Chinese were playing rather strangely in many matches and for many years, so the new information doesn't shock me. Already back then we were upset.
But if you ignore the deeply unethical way of doing things, China was actually acting rather wisely. I could never beat Gong Zhichao, and I much preferred playing against Ye Zhaoying. There's no doubt that the Chinese knew this, and that they had a much better chance of winning gold by getting Gong Zhichao into the final."
If people's skills can vary so much for a given sport such that it's hard or impossible to rank players by skill, then it seems like a tournament bracket is the wrong fit for such a sport. A bracket specifically means there is "one path" to victory and it is specifically structured for producing one winner and it works based on the assumption of the underlying distribution of skill being one where it can be strictly ordered. A fairer system that would match such a distribution of skill would be something like just matches between all players (or many matches at least) and the person with the most wins would get gold, second most silver, and so on. Online video games do this already, tourneys only work in some situations, but player rankings are better for, well ranking because you don't have a situation where the mere structure of a competition causes the winner to not actually be the best player.
This dynamic already exists in almost every competitive sport. Certainly the ones where you go head-to-head with an opponent in a match format vs a race.
Which is why most sports have a variety of formats or phases to address that. The most typical being a regulation season where there is a winner at the culmination. Sometimes those then feed into the more bracket-like format.
The idea that any one of these methods is the path objectively measures the one true best player/team is a fallacy. That any particular award within the same sport is deemed more prestigious than another is largely down to marketing.
I would agree with your last two statements except for the fact that this is the Olympics we are talking about, which literally is the highest competition for sport in the world. Picking out the best is the point of it. Of course likely no one structure can be the best, but choosing a better structure seems wise for a competition which purports to do just that.
I don't really care to attack the structure too, but if the structure is so important that it should be kept, then there still is a good argument that really, arguments about statistics is really not relevant (which is half of what people are arguing with me about). However, a flat structure of just games is specifically the right place to make statistical arguments and judgements because it is naturally ergodic.
> Olympics [...] literally is the highest competition for sport in the world.
Says who? This is strictly down to prestige.
Btw, association football is played at the Summer Olympics. But you'd be hard pressed to argue that it's the highest competition for football. By prestige, that's the FIFA World Cup. By skill, it's perhaps the UEFA Champions League. [0]
[0] I don't know enough about football to say for sure that the Champions League has the highest skill on display. But even the Champions League has way more prestige than the Summer Olympics for football.
I think this is the case for most of the well-known team sports. The professional teams pull players from around the world, and have lots of experience playing together.
Plus the professional teams are have intentionally developed rosters. In the Olympics, if it turns out that Canada has produced the two best goalies this year, then the world's second best goalie will be benched unless there's an injury.
I don't watch football at all, but fifa world cup and champions league are the ones everybody around me watches, from friends to random people, to our cities being half-empty (except the bars with TVs) during final matches.
Olympics are more "meh" and not something people really cared about.
> I would agree with your last two statements except for the fact that this is the Olympics we are talking about, which literally is the highest competition for sport in the world.
I don’t think it is. People don’t really care about the olympics. It’s a far cry from the FIFA World Cup where basically every bars broadcast the games.
Football is the most popular sport in the world and used to be absent from the Olympic and is now present in a mostly uninteresting format. Tennis is fun but not taken that seriously now that it doesn’t carry ATP points.
It’s fairly important for swimming, track and field and the other sports people never watch otherwise.
No.
They are used because you can decide Best of N players in N-1 games.
They are used in sports where the games are long, exhausting (a single player can play only a few of them in short time) and needs a non-trivial infrastructure (think tennis court vs chess board)
You can declare someone to be best of 'Best of N players', but that only really applies strictly if player skill can be ordered linearly and outcome of games is basically a deterministic comparison of skill.
However you are right in general that player exhaustion and logistics play a part as well.
I was not precise.
I didn't mean that it can determine the best player according to any reasonable metric but that it can determine a tournament winner at all.
We just need to keep in mind that the 'tournament winner' is mostly there for entertainment (both of the audience and of the participants), and doesn't necessarily correlate all that well with 'absolute best player overall'.
By creating a big prize (either money or prestige) you create incentive to win and the new definition of best shows up (the one most likely to win this title).
And even in the same sport you can have conflicting goals. E.g. should one try to maximize chance of winning a single prestigious event or get equally good results through the whole season?
At the same time I like analyzing the tournaments from the perspective if the best team (according to a criterion that either players or spectators care about) has the highest chance to win.
> At the same time I like analyzing the tournaments from the perspective if the best team (according to a criterion that either players or spectators care about) has the highest chance to win.
And I declare that 'liking' to be 'entertainment'. Might be a pretty broad definition of entertainment.
Draws of three make luck a major component. If you're disadvantaged against 1/3rd of the field you could end up in a pod with two people you're bad against and ruin your entire Olympics.
This would drastically increase the amount of matches played, making it more of an endurance sport than anything else. There's no perfect solution in the time frame given, all sports tournaments are all well aware of this yet they're still the most popular format.
> if Ye Zhaoying won over the other person with a higher win rate, that means she's better and can make it into the final on her own merits, no?
No. If the only bit of information you have is a single game, then yes, you'd be right to assume the victor was the better player. But in an iterated game, you can easily get into a state where regardless of the outcome of a single game you're still pretty confident that one player is better than the other. It would take many games to tip your estimate. But you don't have many games, you just have the one coming up. What you don't want to have happen is a minor fluke, causing the worse player (estimated win chance 25%) to move on to the finals where they're more likely to lose.
There could also be factors that cause the odds to not follow a simple ordering rule. It could be that player A will likely beat C, B will likely lose to C, and yet B will likely beat A, due to playstyle or something.
But the former thing is more likely what's going on. A beats C is 50% odds, B beats C is 30% odds, A beats B is 70% odds, you want A or B to win and they're playing next, followed by the winner playing against C. B winning can absolutely happen, but it sucks for you if it does.
I didn't understand your point but now I do, because "rock-paper-scissors" as a reply isn't clear enough as a statement to communicate what you wanted, which is just an example of something that isn't transitive.
You're responding to someone giving a reason that isn't based on chance.
Chance is a completely separate topic, but also has a simple answer. Chance doesn't mean that everyone has the same chance. If one player has 40% odds and the other has 60% odds, you want the 60% player to compete.
No complex sport has a one dimensional level of skill. It's always multidimensional. This means it's possible that the relationship of a person beating another person consistently is not transitive.
In any head-to-head competitive sport higher win rates (wr%) do not translate to specific wins, obviously why underdog or upsets happen.
Play style matching matters.
Separately, in video games definitely the concept of winrate stacking/smurfing. Definitely not at the olympic level, but wr% does not necessarily mean a specific win.
In the article Camilla Martin says she could beat Ye Zhaoying but couldn't beat Gong Zhichao:
> But if you ignore the deeply unethical way of doing things, China was actually acting rather wisely. I could never beat Gong Zhichao, and I much preferred playing against Ye Zhaoying. There's no doubt that the Chinese knew this, and that they had a much better chance of winning gold by getting Gong Zhichao into the final.
A Chinese defeating a foreigner (rather than another Chinese) might make for a better spectacle back home. I'm speculating. I don't know anything about Olympics or badminton tournaments.
They are teammates, so they know how each other plays. And Ye is a more experienced player. But she is also famous, so players from other countries studied how she plays.
No, because sports are not fully deterministic. There is randomness involved. You may be strictly worse than another player but still have a 20% chance of beating them.
it's also not cut and dry skill across every player you meet. certain play styles might be one person's kryptonite and a non-factor for others. that's how you get into situations where player A can be beat player B who beats player C yet somehow C can beat A a lot.
This is the kind of things that bother me in current sport. Not that it is a business with backstabbing, just that we paint it as clean and magnificent.
An elite athlete also does not have anything to do with the average Joe out Jane, so let's stop pretending about health and normality.
I played volleyball for my uni, it was a nightmare and I gave up because of the stress and lack of fun. I then played in "business league" and our team was dreadful. We were always messy but this was pure fun and joy. The other teams knew we were bad and they we would loose, so they played cool, had fun with combinations that they would not risk with other teams etc.
We usually ended with 4 or 5 sets because everyone wanted the match to last. And then beer afterwards (I arranged for special funding because we were always the ones to buy the first round...). We had the only mixed team (and thanks god, because the girls were systematically saving the team's ass)
"Olympic spirit" seemed to have died a long time ago, or at least have been engulfed in the spirit of "let's make money!". The IOC is (imo) not an honorable organization, remember them defending China's other actions like the disappearing of the tennis player who had a seemingly-not-100%-consensual sex with the vice premier?
That Chinese athlete joined the Olympics as member of the Chinese Badminton Team, with the focus on "team". If the team's coaches decided that her opponent in the semis had better chances to beat the Danish lady (the only other non-Chinese athlete left in the semis) then what happened here is indeed right for the Chinese team as a whole. As it happens, the Danish lady was defeated in the final by the Chinese athlete chosen by the Chinese coaches to play against her, so it seems that the coach's action was the correct one for the Chinese Badminton Team.
> In this context, the previous national footballer also mentions that their public statements have caused both friends and close family to turn their backs on the couple.
> “My parents have said, ‘Hao is no longer part of this family’.”
> Ye Zhaoying interrupts and says that both her daughter and her father back home in China are furious with her.
> “My father always says that I should live my life and stop talking about the Chinese government. They’re firmly against what we’re doing.”
This is just so sad, her family probably didn't even have much choice in the matter. Either disown the deviant or face punishment for her speech.
> her family probably didn't even have much choice in the matter. Either disown the deviant or face punishment for her speech.
That is an optimistic take. Chinese previous generations I've known in my circle are also stepped in the genuine belief of filial piety and national loyalty.
The problem with easy solutions is that they aren't solutions, and they aren't easy.
It is massively unfair to a top athlete to not being allowed to compete because he's the second best in India, or China, or the United States, when a much lower-ranked athlete from, say, Burkina Faso is allowed to run merely because of their nationality.
The principle of open contest* avoids the problem you cite. Such a problem is inherent to international competition*. The mixture of limited open competition (multiple entries per country) introduces a fault into the system, which corrupts the contest at the highest level as detailed in the article. You make it less likely the best of anywhere will win, so that the second best of somewhere can compete. If you accept the competitive principle that is inherent to the entire design, then the problem goes away.
But yeah, I know most people won't accept this. That is cool. They'll continue to enjoy the Olympics; I'll continue to ignore it.
* In principle, I think a contest that aims to be the pinnacle of a sport, as the Olympics events do generally aim (Association Football being an exception), should be an open contest. However, I'm not sure if an Olympics that was formally open would actually be treated as anything other than effectively an international contest. Still, maybe open would be better (I'd be happy to see it tried), but it is not hard to see that it might cause issues of its own.
* in international competition, it is probably not even fair to consider it a problem, as it is really just an accepted part of such systems.
Technically, the Olympics are considered an open event - while you are supposed to compete under your country's flag (more specifically: under your country's NOC), there is a process in place for when this is not possible[1].
The problem with the Olympics is a different one - an organisation that creates a highly complex event with construction and travel is dependant on national governments to support it (even if there is no corruption involved) - and that will invariably lead to said countries doing it for the prestige. I guess the only way around that would be setting up permanent Olympic venues and giving them a status like the UN General Assembly building
So it is an open that has had international organisation layered on top. That does make more sense, in terms of how it got to where it is.
Another possibililty would be to relax the geographic grouping of the events. Maybe the Meta sponsored Olympics of the future will be willing to do that in the belief that VR/AR have made location less important. It'll be interesting to see how people's sense of physical location and togetherness change with new technology. I hope not, but maybe Meta's idea of 'Connection' will win in the end.
Is this that big a deal? I dislike the Chinese Communist Party, but in sport players sacrifice wins and position for stronger teammates all the time. It's routine in F1 and the Tour de France.
The cases aren't entirely comparable. F1 drivers and Tour de France racers are highly compensated and they go into races knowing the strategy. Being compelled to lose against your will by your national organization sucks. On the other hand, I expect she went into the Chinese badminton team with some idea that this sort of thing might happen.
F1 drivers themselves are just the sharp pointy end of a massive team effort involving hundreds of people and hundreds of millions of dollars. It makes sense that it's not all about them.
Badminton players much more a personal endeavour - one person and their racquet turning up and doing battle.
It everybody is interested in the Olympics as a battle between nations. It's supposed to be about finding the best individual athlete. Clearly not everyone sees it like that.
Nations deciding who will be representing them, and the nation anthem playing on the podium are the most visible side, there's many declarations from the founder to the same effect.
If it truly was individual competition. Nations would not matter in qualifying, there would be unlimited slots for nations if their athletes were good enough.
Which is basically each sport's yearly world championship, as far as I know.
Honestly, instead of trying to improve or tweak the Olympics, straight getting rid of them would help in basically all fronts: no more debt ridden hosting country, no crazy corruptions schemes flying all around, other events an keep their sheer sport focus, centered on the athletes and not where they register their passport.
We'd keep events like the Eurovision for the festive and "your nation is worse than mine" parts. It would all be fine.
Interesting article, I read the whole thing but this little paragraph at the end stood out to me.
> According to the Chinese sports couple, they still own more than ten properties in China, probably worth more than EUR 135 million, and Hao Haidong is the co-owner of several companies.
Thats a lot of money tied up in China for people banned from it. I looked up Hao Haidong's wiki and looks like theyre heavily affiliated with Steve Bannon and the absolutely ridiculous group New Federal State of China.
Mind you, im not saying this article is wrong. I 100% believe she was treated unfairly and made to throw the match. And im not pro-china by anymeans. But like.. anytime I see Bannon or NFSC or GTV, I just know theres a grift involved.
Olympic sports medals is a vain metric that all it does is hide the fact that authoriterian regimes are destroying their countries and pressing their people.
In the Ancient Greek times the Olympic Games were an opportunities for friends an enemies to come together and have FUN!
It wasn't about who won the most medals. Can you imagine if Sparta and Athens were competing for the highest number of golds? Pathetic. But that's what's happening today.
> In the Ancient Greek times the Olympic Games were an opportunities for friends an enemies to come together and have FUN!
Not sure if you're being serious or being sarcastic. Any evidence for your claim?
The ancient Olympics (as the name itself implies!) is about religion. Olympus!
Violence, murder, corruption was part of it. Perhaps as much as it is today.
"Sotades at the ninety-ninth Festival was victorious in the long race and proclaimed a Cretan, as in fact he was. But at the next Festival he made himself an Ephesian, being bribed to do so by the Ephesian people. For this act he was banished by the Cretans."
"In 67, the Roman Emperor Nero competed in the chariot race at Olympia. He was thrown from his chariot and was thus unable to finish the race. Nevertheless, he was declared the winner on the basis that he would have won if he had finished the race."
It might be a vain metric in the aggregate, but to an individual, the people who are passionate about their sport and have worked nearly their entire lives to become the best at it across the entire globe, it's an accomplishment that is nearly incomparable.
Maybe we could have our cake and eat it too: award medals privately. In fact, do all the scoring privately. All the public (and the countries) get is a spectacle. If your country so much as runs a news story afterward about what kind of medal your guy came back with, you’re banned from ever coming back to the Olympics. Only the participant gets to know how they did.
(Yes, this is prima facie ridiculous. But also kind of fun to imagine.)
I dunno, people were literally dying over olive wreaths! See pankration, the most fun sport of all:
> For when he was contending for the wild olive with the last remaining competitor, whoever he was, the latter got a grip first, and held Arrhachion, hugging him with his legs, and at the same time he squeezed his neck with his hands. Arrhachion dislocated his opponent's toe, but expired owing to suffocation; but he who suffocated Arrhachion was forced to give in at the same time because of the pain in his toe. The Eleans crowned and proclaimed victor the corpse of Arrhachion.
> Philostratus of Athens writes in his Gymnasticus that Arrichion's failure to submit to his opponent was the result of his trainer, Eryxias, shouting to him, "What a noble epitaph, 'He was never defeated at Olympia.'"
I dont get this obsession with olympic gold medals from all these authoritarian and despotic regimes, that leads them to cheat and break rules in various ways.
Do they consider gold medals as a sort of confirmation that their bloody regime is doing good ?
I am talking about you china and ruzzia.
IOC should ban china or let only one athlete/one pair of athletes compete
As a reminder we vote with our dollars. Most people don't seem to care. I'd love it if Amazon or Target had a made in a democracy filter where it'd be easy to avoid supporting Winnie the Pooh directly or indirectly.
I wish so to but it seems like our wonderful retail ~overlords~ giants are trying to find new and exciting ways to get us to buy as much cheaply produced goods from other countries rather than promote more expensive goods from at home.
As we have transitioned our economy from having careers to jobs and from owning to financing, the cheap stuff is all we can afford.
People still care but they just care more about surviving.
Have a re-match in not China between the two without any other crap if for no other reason than to heal the spiritual damage done by the Chinese Olympic mafia.
Can't happen. The winner would have to go into exile from China to participate, and both are about double the age now and no longer play competitively (the thrown match was 22 years ago).
> In an exclusive interview with TV 2 SPORT, the Chinese champion tells the whole story for the first time about what exactly happened 22 years ago at the Sydney Olympics, when she was instructed to take a dive in the semi-final against her compatriot, Gong Zhichao.
I think the question was - what alternative was there to 2 Chinese players competing in the semi-finals, when they were the 2 that had advanced to that semi-finals match? They couldn't just say "we refuse to compete."
Per the bracket diagram in the article, out of the four players in the semi-finals, three were Chinese. So there was no way to avoid a match between two Chinese contenders. Unfortunately there isn't much that can be done in terms of tournament structure to avoid it when one nation's team is consistently strong.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/He_Zhili
The gist is that she was ordered to lose in one World Table Tennis Championships, but refused and proceeded to be the champion.
Later she wasn't selected for the next Olympic, which she felt was the punishment for her disobedience. She later immigrated to Japan and played for their national team and gave China some trouble for a while.
There is also this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Badminton_at_the_2012_Summer_O...
The funny thing is, they do that in table tennis (actually also badminton in some other cases other than the one in the article) not even just to secure the gold medal: since China is/was so dominant in this sport, they sometimes do it to ensure certain player can get his/her "grand slam" [2] (to win all the major tournaments in their career).
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Table_tennis#Notable_players