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Not Your Grandma's Badminton

So far, NBC's coverage of the 2004 Olympics has been quite good. Not too many sappy background stories and just enough action to keep me interested. My only complaint is that the less popular sports have been almost totally neglected in prime time. The past few nights have been dominated by swimming, gymnastics and beach volleyball. If you can, try to catch some of the cable coverage on NBC's sister networks: MSNBC, CNBC, USA and BRAVO. After dinner last night, I got to catch a sport you rarely see on TV: badminton.

Unfortunately, badminton is a sport that does not televise well. You thought it was hard to keep track of a hockey puck, try following the path of the shuttle (aka, "birdie") around the screen...especially from the up-and-behind camera angle that NBC was using. The slow motion replays from a side angle revealed much more of the strategy and finesse involved in the sport.

And this is a serious sport, bearing little resemblance to backyard badminton. Badminton players require a blend of catlike reflexes and a soft touch. The net is placed at about eye level (for the typical 6-foot-plus player) and serves must be executed from about mid-torso level. Shots range from soft dribbling over the net to smashes from the back line and everything in between. Play resembles a frenetic but graceful dance, darting back and forth, leaping up and back, the racquets swing from all angles.

Fun fact: the feathers of the shuttle are actual goose feathers, 16 of them, plucked from the left wing of the goose. This is apparently for consistency's sake; the bend of a right-wing feather is reversed and players of Olympic-caliber can tell the difference. And those feathers can get pretty beaten up during play. During one match I watched, the shuttlecock was changed at least a dozen times (probably twice that).

I wonder what happens to all the right-wing goose feathers...