Badminton: It’s China’s football

BEIJING – When you really get down to it, what American Eva Lee and Canadian Anna Rice were doing was hitting 16 overlapping goose feathers embedded into a rounded cork base covered in thin leather back and forth.

Or playing badminton, to be less technical.

You remember the game your family sometimes played at backyard picnics with the net and plastic birdie and what looked like itty bitty tennis rackets, right?

Well, it is an Olympic sport. And the Chinese fans who literally packed into Beijing University of Technology Saturday loved every single minute of action.

Raucous cheering, ooh-ing and aah-ing were a constant backdrop while as many as three matches played simultaneously.

Fans screamed for autographs afterward.

A couple of them bumped and jumped to catch a wrist band Rice threw after an epic three-set victory.

“In this county, you are proud to say you are a badminton player,” Belarus badminton-er Olga Konon said. “Because people, if you say, ‘I am a badminton player’, they say, ‘Wow, cool’, not like in my country or in Europe where it is not that popular.”

Badminton is China’s football, or at very least, its hockey. Officials said tickets to table tennis and badminton went quicker than anything else, including basketball and gymnastics.

“Many of us played the badminton in youth,” Beijing resident Changai Sun explained with help of an interpreter before Saturday’s games. “I played for four years and loved playing.”

Almost a Little League of badminton. Or Pee Wee Badminton.

For anybody who has never seen a single badminton game that did not include grilled meats and adult beverages, badminton at the Olympic level is kind of like tennis – tennis with ADD.

Where badminton and tennis really differ is that the lightness of the shuttlecock makes it almost impossible to judge where it is going to land. So players constantly have to reach behind them and try to control this very aerodynamic birdie.

The first one to 21 wins the set. Two sets win the match.

They change sides after sets and midway through the third if there is one as was the case with Lee and Rice. They battled deep into a third set, a historic feat since Lee became the first American woman to win a set in singles at an Olympics.

Chinese fans appreciated that effort, showering them with a standing ovation.

“It’s nice to have so many people appreciate the sport,” Lee said. “At the U.S. Open, even at our best, it was like 400 people.”

There were at least that many in the arena an hour beforehand, taking pictures and soaking in the atmosphere. Yes, the Chinese are serious about their badminton. They claim credit for its invention, they play pretty well and they love to watch.

Four years ago, in Athens, beach volleyball became the rage. Fans flocked to what were games within a party and a TV darling was born. Badminton has a chance to be that sport this Olympic year.

While not as raucous as, say, a beach volleyball crowd – there was no evidence of a wave or string bikinis – a badminton match has a very Chinese feel. Almost like eating Peking Duck or visiting The Great Wall. It is something you should do while in China.

This is why Jim and Barrett Johnson, a father and son from Dallas, decided to buy tickets.

“You would never see badminton in America,” Barrett Johnson said. “So we figured we might as well give it a shot.”