Badminton: 5 Unusual Facts About This Sport
Practiced outside of competition, badminton is a fun sport accessible to all players, regardless of their age and skill level. This game, easy to master and inexpensive, makes for an enjoyable pastime to be played with family. In competition, it is exclusively played indoors. It became an Olympic discipline in 1992 and today stands as one of the most popular sports in the world. Here are 5 unusual things to know about this sport.
In competition, badminton is always played indoors.
Badminton is a racket sport that can be played in singles or doubles, like tennis. However, unlike most racket sports, the projectile used is not a ball. Players hit a shuttlecock with unique aerodynamic properties back and forth.
As the shuttlecock's trajectory is highly sensitive to wind, badminton is always played indoors when it comes to competitions.
The shuttlecock's speed can exceed 300 km/h.
Badminton, which involves exchanging the shuttlecock with a racket over a net set at 1.524 meters high at the center and 1.55m at the posts, is not known for being a spectacular sport.
Yet, the speed of the shuttlecock can be impressive! It varies depending on the hitting techniques used and can range from 3 km/h during a drop shot to over 300 km/h during a smash. The world record, timed in 2023 right off the racket of Indian player Satwiksairaj Rankireddy, is even 565 km/h!
The badminton projectile is thus the fastest of all among the various racket sports. By comparison, the speed of a Tennis ball does not exceed 260km/h, even in a match between professional players.
The game of shuttlecock is 2000 years old.
English officers from the Indian army introduced the game of badminton to Great Britain in 1873. However, the origins of this sport are much older as a similar game was already played by the Chinese around 2000 years ago.
Another precursor to badminton is the battledore and shuttlecock, a game that has been played in England since the Middle Ages. It involves keeping a shuttlecock in the air using a type of racket or paddle known as a "battledore".
Badminton owes its name to a place.
Modern badminton is inspired by the Indian game of poona, which is played with a racket and a ball. British army officers in India imported this game to Great Britain, where it was first played in 1873 at Badminton House, the residence of the Duke of Beaufort, hence the name of the sport.
An anecdote suggests that these officers used a Champagne cork with feathers attached because they did not have a ball available. Four years later, they published the rules of the game and claimed its invention.
Badminton is among the most popular sports in the world.
In the West, badminton is sometimes seen as a simple beach pastime accessible to everyone and useful for developing reflexes, accuracy, flexibility, and speed. It is generally unknown that this sport enjoys immense popularity in other parts of the world. It is the most played sport in Asia and the second most played sport in the world after soccer.
The greatest champions in this Olympic discipline come from China, Indonesia, Thailand, Korea, or Malaysia. In Europe, only two countries compete with the Asians: Denmark and England.
The International Badminton Federation (BWF), founded in 1934, brings together 150 countries across 5 continents. It is estimated that there are more than 390 million players worldwide. In France, the number of players is constantly increasing, with some 114,725 registered members in 2006 compared to 51,671 in 1996.
More broadly, this sport, which has been an official Olympic discipline since 1992, generates real enthusiasm all over the world. The champions of the sport, predominantly Asians, are followed by millions of fans and earn millions of dollars in annual winnings. This Olympic sport will undoubtedly be one of the most followed during the Paris 2024 Olympics with its five events (men's singles, women's singles, men's doubles, women's doubles, and mixed doubles).
