He said
Never will I be even close to competing at an Olympic level in any sport, but I do enjoy playing all sports and I do enjoy winning.
However I can honestly say I would never throw a match for a better chance at winning gold. Now maybe I'm not the best person to be talking about this considering my low level of talent, but if I were an elite athlete, I think I would want to win every match possible.
If you enter the Olympics looking for the easiest way possible to win gold, you're already cheating yourself and the fans. To me the easiest way to win gold is to win every match, race or game you play in.
Some people are blaming the round robin tournament style of badminton for the reason that people were throwing matches. In fact before the Olympic Games started, people were predicating this would happen.
If people were looking for this, then I would think they would try to cover it up a little more, especially in badminton where the teams seem to be able to put the shuttlecock into play so easily. How hard would it have been for the teams just to hit it long or wide?
I'm glad these teams got caught for throwing games, and I'm hoping no one lost tons of money in Las Vegas betting on them.
She said
I wish I could say that I have too many morals to throw a match. I wish I could say that I wasn't so competitive that I'd purposefully lose an event because winning meant so much to me.
But that would be lying and I try really, really hard not to lie. So ya, I'd probably throw a match if I thought it would benefit me in the long run. This would probably backfire on me, since I'd somehow end up losing the matches I figured I would so easily win.
If I did throw a match, though, I'd try to be a little bit more discreet than the women's badminton teams that purposefully smoked the birdie into the net in an attempt to throw their match. I would look like I was playing hard. Take golf, which someone told me is going to be in the 2016 Olympics. I can really convincingly lose at golf. I have a lot of experience losing at golf, actually. Though I can't imagine how purposefully scoring high would help with golf...
So yes, I am one of those evil, unfortunate people who are competitive and ambitious enough to throw a professional sporting match in order for a better chance at the title. Sport takes a lot of strategy and sometimes you have to lose to win. I don't really see anything wrong with that.
