China's Badminton Pair Loses the Asian Games Final After Playing Through Injury
Liu Shengshu knelt on court in the deciding game of the Nagoya Asian Games women's doubles final and kept playing, then refused a wheelchair to walk off. She and Tan Ning lost 2-1 to South Korea — on a schedule players are calling brutal.
The last point of the Asian Games women's doubles final ended with both Chinese players on the floor. Liu Shengshu and Tan Ning lost the Nagoya final 2-1 to South Korea's Baek Ha-na and Lee So-hee on September 29 — but the score is the least of what the Chinese internet took from the match. Midway through the deciding game, after more than an hour on court, Liu's leg gave out; she sank to her knees mid-rally and still got the shuttle back over the net. Treated briefly, she went back on — and, as one state media post put it, "even if it meant finishing on her knees, she would finish." When the last point fell, Tan Ning buried her head in a towel and cried; Liu refused the wheelchair waiting courtside and walked off, step by step, on a leg that could no longer hold her. The match commentator called the final points in a voice close to tears.
The pair, whom Chinese fans call Shengtan (圣坛) — "the altar" — came into the tournament as world silver medallists: in August, the same Korean pair beat them in straight games at the world championships, a title that ended South Korea's 31-year wait in the event. Nagoya took three games, an hour of it, and everything Liu's body had left.
The hashtag "the women's doubles final was too tragic-heroic" (羽毛球女双决赛太悲壮了) filled with posts calling the pair "glorious in defeat" (虽败犹荣) — a stock phrase of Chinese sports discourse that here read as sincere — and one account's description of the ending was liked more than a thousand times within hours.
What made the injury angrier was the calendar. Badminton at these Games has stacked singles and doubles into days of double duty — a "devil schedule" that, as one trending complaint put it, a sport demanding this much stamina and focus should never run at a top event, and which India's P. V. Sindhu criticized in terms Chinese media rendered as "asking for the athletes' lives." Liu and Tan's final was the cost of one such day. The same afternoon, China's Jiang Zhenbang and Wei Yaxin beat Indonesia 21-19, 21-8 for the mixed doubles gold, and the men's doubles pair of Liang Weikeng and Wang Chang were still contesting a final of their own as the argument ran.
By day's end there had been no update on Liu's injury. The argument about the schedule, which produced it, was still running.