The chronicles of badminton
Another week of pushing The Lamron marks another week in which I scramble to find some topic of moderate relevance to sports to discuss in order to publish anything at all (seriously, please write for the sports section). This is all to say that this week I’ll be forgoing traditional coverage of the world of sports in Geneseo and beyond and will instead craft a comprehensive history of everyone’s favorite sport: the nail-biting, stadium-rattling, jaw-dropping badminton.
Most alumni of public-school systems will recall several days, perhaps even weeks, of being forced into teams with other sweaty adolescents, donning long-broken rackets with loose strings and contorted handles to play a few rounds of this thrilling sport. Personally, badminton was always my favorite unit; despite my poor vision that I refuse to rectify with consistent glasses-wearing and a complete lack of depth perception, I found the repetitive, delicate beating of a feathery ball to be rather meditative.
So, badminton means a lot to me… or it at least means something, and so today I’d like to unpack the history of this nostalgic sport—how did it come into play in the United States? Where did its name, and it’s silly, plume-like ball, come from?
As with most modern sports, badminton as we know it is a mixture of games that can be traced all the way to Ancient Greece and Egypt, where it was dubbed battledore and shuttlecock, respectively. There are also reports that it began in China, though this is less universally documented; there were most likely different renditions of the game coexisting throughout the ancient world with marginal differences in gameplay, ball type, and racket type. Versions of the sport persisted into the seventeenth and eighteenth-century, and it maintained immense popularity, particularly in India, where it was called poona and involved hitting a feather shuttlecock (another name for birdie) back and forth with small rackets.
In the late nineteenth-century, British colonial officers took to this game while they were stationed in India. When they returned to their home country, they informed the English elite of their new hobby. In 1873, the Duke of Beaufort—a role created in 1683, one of many in Britain’s incredibly-complicated dukedom—hosted a party at the Badminton House, an estate reserved for the duke in the village and civil parish of Badminton, Gloucestershire. This estate gave badminton its now-iconic name.
Badminton’s boom was the result of incredible historical timing; nineteenth-century economic ambitions resulting in the stationing of British officers in India were also contributing to the necessity and organization of citizen-led labor, which created the modern “work week.”
Before the nineteenth century, there was little to no distinction between weekdays and the weekend. Regulation acts in the early part of the century, including the Cotton Factories Regulation Act (1819) and Regulation of Child Labor Law (1833) cut down working hours and allotted Saturday and Sunday as designated time for leisure, which still allowed for the majority of the week to be spent on physical labor.
These regulations did not, of course, halt labor exploitation; they did, however, make social activities—sports, parks, theater productions—more attractive. It is also worth noting that the highly-competitive version of badminton we recognize today (as well as even more intense adaptations like Speed Badminton, which doesn’t use a net) does not reflect how the game was originally conducted; its early iterations involved relaxing, low-movement games on lush lawns and village parks—the perfect setting and activity for people in need of a break from the tolls of constant, unrecognized toil.
Since American labor endeavors were making similar strides during this time period, the sport took very quickly to American culture. What really solidified its place in the sports canon was its introduction to the Olympics in 1922. Ironically, mixed doubles (which included men and women in one match) were not introduced to the Olympics until 1996, though badminton is one of few sports that was not gender-exclusionary because of its ties to leisure and its emergence within the English nobility; illustrations of early badminton games show ladies in extensive noble garb playing alongside dukes.
Interestingly, though badminton is a favorite among American high school gym teachers, its countries of origin still prevail at the professional level. At the Tokyo Olympics in 2020, Chinese Taipei took gold, the People’s Republic of China took silver, and Malaysia took the bronze prize. Its roots show both in the persisting skill of its native countries, and in that its basic gameplay is incredibly similar to poona and its ancient iterations.
Sources:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Badminton_House
https://olympics.com/en/olympic-games/tokyo-2020/results/badminton
https://www.chaseyoursport.com/Badminton/Digging-into-the-history-of-badminton%C2%A0/152