Badminton is officially the world’s fastest racquet sport.
BADMINTON England – Fast facts.
One of the Britain’s best loved and most popular sports.
3.3 million adults play at least once a year –
more people play badminton than play cricket or rugby.
563,000+ players aged over 14 play badminton every week
846,000 over 16s play once a month
300,000+ people play on a casual basis
Can be enjoyed at any age from 6 years old to 75 year olds
Loved by women and men – one of the UK’s most gender-balanced sports with 194,400 women playing every week
Other interesting facts from around the web :
The first official badminton club
was The Bath Badminton Club, established in 1877.
It is claimed that
badminton is
the second most-popular participation sport in the world,
only behind football. When badminton was first included in the Olympics in Barcelona in 1992, 1.1 billion people watched on television.
The official world smash speed record
is 332 km/h (206 mph), set by men’s doubles player Fu Haifeng of China, on June 3, 2005 in the Sudirman Cup. In the singles competition, the fastest smash recorded is 305 km/h (189 mph) by Taufik Hidayat of Indonesia.
A badminton match once lasted just 6 minutes
. The shortest badminton match ever recorded was at the 1996 Uber Cup in Hong Kong, which lasted all of six minutes! Ra Kyung-min (South Korea) crushed Julia Mann (England) 11-2, 11-1 in that match.
The longest match
on the other hand lasted 124 minutes, and was contested between Peter Rasmussen (Denmark) and Sun Jun (China). Rasmussen won that encounter 16-17, 18-13, 15-10.
Badminton is a ‘socialist game’
. The average shuttlecock weighs between 4.74 to 5.5 grams and is made from the feathers of the
left wing
of a goose (no right wing tendencies here). 16 feathers are used in the manufacture of a shuttle. Top-level matches use 10 shuttles, with each being hit 400 times.
Badminton is a LOT more intense than tennis.
At the 1985 All England (Tennis) Championships, Boris Becker defeated Kevin Curren 6-3, 6-7, 7-6, 6-4. At the 1985 World Badminton Championships in Calgary, Canada, Han Jian of China defeated Morten Frost of Denmark, 14-18, 15-10, 15-8. The following is a statistical comparison of those matches.
Time: Tennis – 3 hours and 18 minutes; Badminton – 1 hour and 16 minutes (the badminton players competed for half the time, yet ran twice as far and hit nearly twice as many shots!)
Ball/shuttle in play: Tennis – 18 minutes; Badminton – 37 minutes
Match Intensity*: Tennis – 9 percent; Badminton – 48 percent
Rallies: Tennis – 299; Badminton – 146
Shots: Tennis – 1,004; Badminton – 1,972
Shots Per Rally: Tennis – 3.4; Badminton – 13.5
Distance Covered: Tennis – 2 miles; Badminton – 4 miles