Beijing Games: another shuttlecock-up

With less than five months to go until the Beijing Olympics, the head coach of China's badminton team has admitted to fixing a match at the 2004 Games in Athens, when he instructed a Chinese player to throw a crucial tie in order to help ensure China won the gold medal.

When the rest of the world is questioning China's legitimacy as the Olympic host, when riots are engulfing Tibet, when the planet's most celebrated film director Stephen Spielberg has quit his role as artistic director to the Games, and with the Olympic torch-lighting ceremony marred by anti-China protestors, the nation's badminton coach Li Yongbo (right) has chosen an indelicate moment to drop his bombshell. And yet he has shown no remorse. "It shows our patriotism and in fact I am proud of it," he bragged.

What Li Yongbo revealed this

week is that when two Chinese players, Zhou Mi and Zhang Ning, were drawn together in the 2004 Olympic semi-final tie, Zhou was told by her coach "not to work too hard and let Zhang into the final" so that the "gold medal ends up in Chinese hands". In short, the coaching staff decided after watching them play one game which of the two players had the greater hope of going all the way, and ordered the other to throw the game. Zhou duly crashed out in straight sets, and her compatriot went on to take top spot on the podium as planned. She is expected to defend her title this year.

The coach's frank admission has reopened the debate over China's long tradition of placing national pride before sporting fair play, in direct contrast to the Olympic ideal of "openness, fairness and justice". In 1987, Chinese table tennis player He Zhili was ordered to throw