I know this will get moved to somewhere that nobody ever looks at but for what its worth..... I disagree with the disqualification of the badminton mixed pairs. Seriously.

I will watch runners, ease up and not give everything to conserve energy for the next round, in athletcis you can watch pacemakers who have no intention of finishing the race, I will see football/hockey games where a draw means both teams qualify not attacking each other with gusto. Swimmers who know they can qualify without trying for a pb, rowers who see they are ahead conserve energy. Relay teams who don't use their best runners until the final. These badminton players because of the system knew that if they lost this match or "race" would have an easier next round, it was the group system that was wrong not the players imo. I maybe in a minority but it sure as hell is my view. If you win you play Spain in the next round if you lose you play Scotland...no brainer.

I think it was the manner of the way they were trying to lose that was the real problem.

As a football manager you may well want to lose so you can play Scotland rather than Spain and if you play a young team that you expect to be beaten but who will try and win that’s ok, but if that young team then played out of their skins and were going to win and you tell your keeper to throw the match then you are going to be universally criticised. Trading serves into the net in badminton is the equivalent of a keeper throwing a match. It may not be against the rules but it definitely goes against the spirit of the games.

I'm not saying that their disqualification right or wrong, I'm just giving the reason I think it happened!

Good post VR and a measured response from J No1. I tend to agree it was the manner in which the "tactics" were being employed rather than the strategy that lay behind them i.e. in this case the manipulation of the result was bare-faced. Bit like the difference between some mild squad rotation to blood youngsters in a less important game and what McCarthy did with Wolves when he banked on losing to MUFC and beating the Clarets. Unfortunately for us it frickin' well worked!! That said in the Badminton I think a stern warning would maybe have been a better way to deal with the situation.

Or when Real Madrid had 3 players sent off in the Champions League to make sure that they had a clean slate for the next round.
Great rant though dad (them pills must be working)

Thanks, I thought I would be in a minority but the above give me hope that I am not. I agree it was the maner in which they achieved their aim, just like Real Madrid and didn't one of the Chappel brothers once bowl the last ball under arm to stop a six being scored?

So my rant (simplified) is against a system that encourages sportmen and women not to do their best, thus increasing their chances of success. Maybe just like minivr we could try and remember some classics. Was it Argentina that needed to score about 7 past Peru and somehow managed it!

I suspect it was the media obsession with The Olympics wot done it.

When compared to the antics that regularly take place in other sports - some of which have been mentioned here - it was pretty mild.

Once the weight of the celebrity obsessed BBC was added to the mix though there was only going to be one outcome.

Here here RT. Cannot believe the media saturation on the Beeb. Clearly this is big news for the UK but the hours devoted to mere speculation by various pundits is mind numbing. That said, as I write we are receiving another gold in the cycling, bloody marvellous.

I can't really add much to the argument, as I managed to miss most of what was arguably GB's greatest w/e of sport, travelling up to Macclesfield to see my 90-yr-old Dad and 86-yr-old Mum, and spending the time there doing what they wanted to do... which included some Olympics, but not much, and more on 5 Live than on the telly.

Sods Law kicked in more than once when I did catch some action.

For example... After they went to bed on Saturday night, after I had missed Ennis and Rutherford, I just had time to enjoy Farrah's last 3 laps on 5 Live before hearing our footy guys lose yet another quarter final, this time being shown why Korea is better than we are at calm sports like archery.

But all was not lost.

Two days earlier, while I was waiting for a connection at Euston, a group of 4 official timekeepers (sport unidentified) had passed within a metre of me.

Then, on the last leg of my train journey home, I was chatting with a guy who had been given an 11th hour free ticket to watch the Three Gold Night of athletics the night before! I could see the hairs still standing on his forearms!

I was there!!!

Moments later the train's PA system kicked in with news of Murray's gold.

I fell back down to earth while munching a sandwich on a bench in Axminster's churchyard and waiting for the only-every-2-hour Sunday bus home. As I bravely kept the adolescent seagulls at bay, Murray and Robson lost another shoot-out.

What did anyone think of the Brit rowers being allowed to restart because their seat broke in the first 100 metres?

Noting the high number of public school participants in Team GB, I was left contemplating that Waterloo may have been won on the playing fields of Eton, but that Napoleon would not have called time if Zara's ancestors' saddles had slipped.