Lin Dan incident closed

One of the first sport scandal stories of 2008 was an on court fight involving current world number one men’s badminton player Lin Dan. The Badminton World Federation investigated and have released a statement to conclude.

In the Korean Open men’s singles final, Lin Dan became angry following several line calls going the way of local opponent Lee Hyun Il. The tension spilled over into incident when Lee’s coach Li Mao, also Chinese, commented to the effect of telling Lin Dan to pipe down. Lin Dan threw his racket and then members of both teams had to be separated.

The BWF announced today that no further punishment will be handed out to Lin Dan. The investigating committee found that Korean line judges had in fact been unfairly calling in favor of local players. The chair of the investigating committee, Anne Smilie said:

It was a sad fact that the evidence did show that some line judges were not basing their decisions on the facts. The evidence, particularly from the Korean event, led to the conclusion that line calls were in favour of local players.

Hopefully, this statement will go some way to clarify the actual issue at the heart of the incident as some local news outlets seem to be confused. The week of the game, Shanghai TV’s sports commentary show G-Talk (今日体育快评) waxed lyrical on the place of Li Mao to go against his fellow Chinese, forgetting in the process that he didn’t make the bad calls himself and is not a referee. Trying to explain why Lin Dan lost his temper at the incident G-talk explained that “if we were talking about a blue-eyed, blonde haired foreigner then of course we’d expect them to cheat us but this man was also Chinese!” (translation by Shanghaiist).

BWF Official Site: original story