Eight badminton players (four doubles teams) in the Olympics have been booted out because of charges that they deliberately lost their games. Why might they have wanted to lose? Because these were pool games in qualifying rounds and whom one played in the subsequent round depends upon your ranking in your qualifying group. Being second in your group may sometimes provide a better path to getting to the finals than being first, depending on how teams in the other groups fare. This kind of tactical maneuvering for group ranking is a common problem in any sport that has round-robin qualifying group matches before going into the sudden-death final rounds. [Read more…]

I first watched the Olympics on TV in 1976, when I was in the US as a graduate student, and quickly became fed up. The inane chatter of the anchors and commentators, the frequent long breaks for commercials, and the excessive focus on only showing events in which Americans had hopes of winning medals, were all annoying. [Read more…]