Badminton, among the handful of sports the U.S. has never medaled in the Olympics, now has a majority California roster of athletes on Team U.S.A. competing in this year’s Summer Games, which begin Friday in Paris.
Five of the seven athletes hail just from the Bay Area: Vinson Chiu of Milpitas, Jennie Gai of Fremont, Annie and Kerry Xu, twin sisters from San José, and Joshua Yuan of San Mateo.
The rest of the team includes a fellow Californian, Howard Shu from Orange County, and Beiwen Zhang from Las Vegas.
With the exception of Shu and Zhang, who competed in Rio and Tokyo, respectively, their peers are first-time Olympians.
The Xu sisters, who will compete in the women’s doubles, won a silver medal at the 2023 Pan American Games. Chiu and Yuan, who will compete in the men’s doubles, won a bronze medal at the XXVII YONEX Pan Am Individual Championships in 2024. Chiu and Gai, who will compete in the mixed doubles, also won a silver medal at the 2023 Pan American Games.
“Our players definitely have the potential to put up a fight and really give the top players a run for their money,” said Timothy Lam of Mountain View, who grew up and trained with some of these athletes during his Olympic run, which culminated in Tokyo in 2021.
Badminton, which has been an official Olympic sport since 1992, is popular outside the U.S. in many European and Asian countries, including China, Japan and Korea. Lam said badminton doesn’t get the same recognition as other Olympic sports in the U.S. but it has still cultivated a network in some states, like California, producing top-notch players.
He talked more about this with KQED’s Brian Watt. Here’s an excerpt of their conversation, which has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Many of us have probably seen badminton. It looks a bit like tennis. There are rackets and a net. But then there’s the birdie, which is different from a bouncing ball. So how would you describe badminton for people who aren’t so familiar with it?
Timothy Lam: Believe it or not, it’s actually the fastest racket sport in the world with shots going over 400 mph. So it’s important to have good reflexes and train your body to be able to react in like a split second. And I think the misconception about badminton in the U.S. is that it’s played outdoors in someone’s backyard, like with a racket in your right hand and holding a beer in your left hand while the whole family is doing an outdoor barbecue kind of thing. But the reality is that professional, competitive badminton is really meant to be played indoors at a really high intensive pace and level.
How did you get into badminton? What drew you to this sport so much that you eventually went on to compete in the Tokyo Olympics?
Lam: Around 6 years old, my parents wanted me to do something to stay active, as an extracurricular activity. Eventually, as I got older and started to win more competitions, it turned into an after-school, five-days-a-week thing. And then I think at that point I started winning more local, national and then international competitions. From there it just sort of progressed into something that I was really passionate about, and I wanted to see myself take it to the next level. Which is why, after college, I decided to go pro and give it a shot for competing at the Olympics.
How did it come to be that California is such a big producer of badminton players?
Lam: Badminton is really popular in Europe and Asia, especially. So considering that a lot of people from Asia immigrate to either California or New York, I’d say that those two states are pretty popular in terms of badminton. And considering the high amount of resources that California has to build these badminton clubs for the players to get started in the sport, I think is a huge reason as to why California is able to produce these players at such a high level.
We hear about support for certain Olympic sports, very high profile ones like gymnastics and swimming. But what does support for badminton look like?
Lam: There is a huge lack of endorsements and sponsors. And I think that really is also due to the fact that we don’t have an official government-supported national team. I really feel like there’s a huge difference between the U.S. and countries like Japan or Korea or China, where they have a state or government-sponsored national team, whereas our players in the U.S. are all independent, self-funded, which really makes it more difficult to get the players to sacrifice all other aspects of their lives. Many of our upcoming juniors have aspirations outside of badminton to go to a top tier university. And so I think that’s probably one of the biggest things that is preventing badminton from increasing in terms of popularity in the U.S.
Who are the countries to beat?
Lam: Denmark, China, Japan and Korea. But I definitely say more so China. Because in the past 20 years at the Olympics, they’ve earned medals in all five disciplines.
