Matthew Syed, in the Times, is one more commentator taking the view that the badminton players who threw their games shouldn't have been punished as they were. He calls their disqualification 'a horrible over-reaction' (£). This topic may have been done to death by now, but I'll give it another whirl just to point out two significant features of Syed's argument. Here are its key paragraphs:
The tragedy of match-fixing is that players deliberately lose for cash. They subvert their sporting ambitions for a financial one. The basic premise of sport is that participants are there to win. Without this ambition, sport is not sport.
But with the badminton debacle, officials created a system where two fundamental sporting ambitions collided. Athletes are supposed to want to win gold. In any tolerable system, winning gold and winning matches are synonymous. At the badminton, they were not.
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People are right to feel angry on behalf of spectators, but it is not the players who should be the target. It is the officials who created the system...
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This is the wrong decision for all the wrong reasons. This was not match-fixing, or anything like it. It is the officials who should be ejected; not the players.
One can certainly agree with the claim that the officials bear a big responsibility for what happened. If the system was such as to encourage the malpractice of losing deliberately in order to get an easier match later on, then it was flawed.
However, first, by trying to lose, those players not only overlooked the Olympic oath and a rule of the World Badminton Federation (see 4.5 here), they were in breach of what Syed himself specifies as being a foundational norm of of the activity: the ambition to win. Without the conscientious effort to win, competitive games are ruined. Why he should see going for a medal as the sounder choice where there is this conflict of priorities is therefore hard to understand. Second, Syed declares that throwing a game isn't match-fixing. But he can only say this by narrowing the definition of match-fixing to rigging the outcome for money. This is an arbitrary restriction of the meaning of the expression. Throwing a game is fixing the result in a way which bypasses the thing that is supposed to determine it, the competitive efforts of the participants. There seems no reason to make a desire for monetary gain the sole criterion of the meaning of match-fixing.