00:00As she prepared for her first serve against the greatest, most feared badminton duo in the world,
00:05she was almost certain that she and her teammate would lose this match.
00:09The South Korean player served, and the Chinese player hit the shuttlecock straight into the net.
00:14Okay, that's alright. They're just warming up, I guess.
00:18She served again towards the other Chinese player, and she also hit it straight into the net.
00:23Usually China dominated this sport.
00:25In fact, the Chinese pair were ranked number one in the world, and now it looked like they'd forgotten how
00:31to play.
00:32And as the Chinese players started serving, it became apparent to everyone in the crowd
00:36that this wouldn't be the nail-biting Olympic matchup that they had all come to see.
00:41They're surfing fault after fault.
00:43I'm sorry, you know, it's blindingly obvious what's going on.
00:45So what was going on?
00:47Well, both teams had already qualified for the quarterfinals,
00:50and this group stage match would determine which team they would be playing against in the next round.
00:55If China won, they'd play against the other Chinese team,
00:58which would destroy the possibility of China getting both a gold and a silver medal in the finals.
01:03So they were instructed by their coach to try and lose the game.
01:07However, what they didn't count on was that South Korea also didn't want to win this match.
01:12They're both trying to lose, and that is unforgivable.
01:16See, the other Chinese team were the second-best players in the world,
01:19so the South Koreans didn't want to be up against them in the next round either.
01:22So it became possibly the first match in Olympic history where both countries were competing to lose.
01:29China were off to an incredible start, managing to lose six points within minutes.
01:33But South Korea were determined to fail.
01:36They pounded the shuttlecock into the net, they put it out of bounds,
01:38and they even threw in some technical faults when serving.
01:41Genius.
01:42But no matter how terrible they played, there were no match for the slop that China was serving up.
01:47The tournament referee paused the match to tell both countries to play properly.
01:51But nothing was going to stop these heroes.
01:54China did successfully lose the match,
01:57but after officials reviewed the whole scandal, both teams were disqualified,
02:01as were an Indonesian team and another South Korean team who did the same thing in their match,
02:06and the competition format for future Olympics was changed so that this would never happen again.
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