I'd read about this before I turned on the TV - two South Korean teams , a Chinese team and an Indonesian team each deliberately tried to lose, because they wanted matchups against easier pairs in the "knockout round." (Whatever the heck that is.) So they were tossed from the Olympics.
Well, just turned on the TV and NBC showed a few seconds of the matches...and yes - they were obviously trying to throw the match - no attempt to deceive at all and at least pretend that they were trying but juuuuust missing.
And the thing is, they - all these teams - were warned throughout the matches. Yet continued to tank.
So they can hardly be surprised that they were thrown out today - except, being stupid, maybe they were.
It does kind of besmirch the honor of the Olympics... not that they'd try to position themselves for easier rounds in the future (although you'd think a champion would want to face the best at all times .... but that tey didn't use their skill to make it at least seem like they were trying! At the very least they should have kept their serves normal, and hit the shuttlecock out of bounds seemingly by accident. But continuously hitting serves into the net? At Olympic level? Too obvious.
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